Quantum Furball - personalhttps://quantumfurball.net/2015-06-16T00:00:00-04:00Now in convenient blog form!Hey look-it, I'm on the TV!2015-06-16T00:00:00-04:002015-06-16T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2015-06-16:/hey-look-it-im-on-the-tv.html<p>So it seems my face has now graced (or disgraced, perhaps) North American television. Some folks from DMG Productions were in the lab a while ago gathering footage for a segment on IQC for Innovations with Ed Begley, Jr. Though my supervisor fielded the actual spoken material, you can spot me in the background of various “action shots” discussing <em>clearly very important things</em>™ with students and colleagues.</p>
<p>Here's the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kMG5VyXHX4">segment in question</a>, first broadcast on Discovery Channel, May 25, 2015.</p>
<p>I've similarly been on Australian TV before, so that makes two continents that have had to deal with my mug on air.</p>
A new beginning: Relaunching my website2013-08-21T00:00:00-04:002013-08-21T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2013-08-21:/a-new-beginning-relaunching-my-website.html<p>Some time ago in a far off land, I kept a website. It was a cozy little website, housing a few bits and bobs that I had made and thought to share should other people find them at all useful. It was hosted with my <abbr title="Internet Service Provider">ISP</abbr>, accessible via a free domain, which made things cheap and easy for me, but also meant that if I were ever to move I'd have to find a new host, or lose my site.</p>
<p>Of course I moved and I lost my site. This was a couple of years ago, now. From then until now I've been meaning to get this thing back up and running at some point, but lack of time and real impetus meant that it didn't happen. Recently I got my butt into gear and began a focused effort to finally get it off the ground, getting myself some cheap hardware and a new domain name for the purpose.</p>
<p>What you see here is the result—welcome to <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net">Quantum Furball</a>! Over the next little while I'll be reposting old things (backdated as accurately as I can guess), along with things I should've posted at the time, and I hope to [...]</p><p>Some time ago in a far off land, I kept a website. It was a cozy little website, housing a few bits and bobs that I had made and thought to share should other people find them at all useful. It was hosted with my <abbr title="Internet Service Provider">ISP</abbr>, accessible via a free domain, which made things cheap and easy for me, but also meant that if I were ever to move I'd have to find a new host, or lose my site.</p>
<p>Of course I moved and I lost my site. This was a couple of years ago, now. From then until now I've been meaning to get this thing back up and running at some point, but lack of time and real impetus meant that it didn't happen. Recently I got my butt into gear and began a focused effort to finally get it off the ground, getting myself some cheap hardware and a new domain name for the purpose.</p>
<p>What you see here is the result—welcome to <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net">Quantum Furball</a>! Over the next little while I'll be reposting old things (backdated as accurately as I can guess), along with things I should've posted at the time, and I hope to be posting new stuff as time progresses. Definitely this will end up being more of a blog than the site I used to have, and that will give me the opportunity to post more useful snippets as I encounter them, as well as bits of personal interests and escapades. I hope that ultimately it's all interesting and useful.</p>
<p>Oh, and if you like technical things, this may interest you: This website is brought to you by a <a class="reference external" href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a>. :)</p>
My home-built personal video recorder nightmare 2: peace and quiet2007-04-02T00:00:00-04:002007-04-02T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2007-04-02:/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare-2-peace-and-quiet.html<p>After some <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">expensive failed experiments in building a dedicated MythBox out of a MiniITX form factor system</a>, I decided what I <em>really</em> wanted was a quiet machine that would do everything. That is, a machine I could just leave on all the time, downloading, serving, processing, recording... anything. The problem I had in attempting to do this with my regular desktop machine was that my machine was (a) situated only a couple of metres from my bed, and (b) loud. Loud enough to make sleeping anywhere near it uncomfortable.</p>
<p>With the new goal to fix the problem of noise, I bought a new case on my way back from visiting my parents over the Christmas break: an Antec P180. I also bought a new, quiet PSU: an Antec TruePower Trio 550W.</p>
<p>As I work during the day (starting a new year in the lab), all of the following happened over several consecutive nights. I had to spend a couple of nights disassembling everything from the old case and reassembling everything in the new case. It wasn't until some days later that I was finally able to check whether my machine had not only survived the trip home (which, honestly, was [...]</p><p>After some <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">expensive failed experiments in building a dedicated MythBox out of a MiniITX form factor system</a>, I decided what I <em>really</em> wanted was a quiet machine that would do everything. That is, a machine I could just leave on all the time, downloading, serving, processing, recording... anything. The problem I had in attempting to do this with my regular desktop machine was that my machine was (a) situated only a couple of metres from my bed, and (b) loud. Loud enough to make sleeping anywhere near it uncomfortable.</p>
<p>With the new goal to fix the problem of noise, I bought a new case on my way back from visiting my parents over the Christmas break: an Antec P180. I also bought a new, quiet PSU: an Antec TruePower Trio 550W.</p>
<p>As I work during the day (starting a new year in the lab), all of the following happened over several consecutive nights. I had to spend a couple of nights disassembling everything from the old case and reassembling everything in the new case. It wasn't until some days later that I was finally able to check whether my machine had not only survived the trip home (which, honestly, was not really anything to worry about), but also whether it all worked successfully inside the new case. As you can imagine, I was pretty confident it would.</p>
<p>Spoiler: Filesystem corruption.</p>
<p>At first it didn't boot completely, but stalled partway through. Strange, I thought, that it would stall like it did. I tried a few times. Sometimes I could get as far as the KDE desktop. Sometimes it wouldn't quite make the login screen. Sometimes it didn't even get as far as booting X.</p>
<p>It looked like a problem getting data from the hard drive. Every attempt, it spoke of ATA command timeouts, Buffer I/O errors, and ATA abnormal status <tt class="docutils literal">0xD0</tt>. Buggered if I know what that means, though. I kept rebooting and retrying and rereading, to try to figure out just what in the hell was going wrong.</p>
<p>At some point something totally screwed up and scattered a bunch of erroneous bits over the 250 GB hard drive—or at least the main partition of it. (The hard drive also hosted a small WinXP partition for gaming.) Then Linux became unbootable.</p>
<p>You know that feeling you get when you lean on a chair just that little bit too far and it starts to fall? Just before you frantically re-balance yourself? “Oh, hell...”</p>
<p>At this point I figured the best immediate course of action was to <strong>leave the bloody thing turned off</strong> until I could figure out the next step. I used the base system from <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">another project that didn't go so well</a>, plugged the 250 GB hard drive in, and did what I could with fsck to salvage and back-up everything onto a separate 400 GB hard drive (the one I had originally intended to store recorded TV on).</p>
<p>The fsck managed to recover many files but, unfortunately, it had no idea what those files were, what they should have been called, or where they should have been located in the filesystem hierarchy. In total I was left with a couple of hundred files all neatly numbered and tucked under /lost+found, including files that used to constitute /sbin/init.</p>
<p>As you might imagine, I was not my usual cheery self at work for the next few days.</p>
<p>Now, it occurred to me as I was performing this salvaging process that if the hard drive itself had a fault then more than likely it would be popping up some kinds of new errors. But it was working, despite the corruption, without issues. The only difference with the hard drive here was that I had limited it to SATA 150 so that the dopey VIA SATA controller in this system would detect it at all. But I wouldn't have thought that that in itself would be enough to solve the problem.</p>
<p>It crossed my mind that it might be my Linux install doing something funky, but I ruled that out quickly. I don't remember upgrading anything in the intervening time, and the error messages looked to me to be very hardware-fault-esque.</p>
<p>As I could see it, the only thing left to blame was the motherboard, an ASUS A8N-SLI. So I blamed it. As far as I could tell, it was a hardware fault on the motherboard. Somehow something had stuffed up as it was either travelling or being moved from one case to another. Perhaps I shorted something accidentally? I try to be careful about these things, grounding myself, etc., but one can only do so much.</p>
<p>Having convinced myself the SATA controller on the motherboard was broken, I tracked down the warranty details. The board was just over a year old but, luckily, ASUS had a 3 year warranty on all their motherboards when I bought it. It was still a bit awkward, though, since I had originally bought it along with a bunch of other stuff for my own and my dad's machines, and he was the one with the receipt. I called him to get him to send a copy to me, but that would take a few days.</p>
<p>Added to this awkwardness was the fact that the shop that we bought this stuff from didn't operate in the same place anymore. Now they were further away. I called up their head office to chat to them about this, and they told me to just bring it to them. Okay, I thought, that's not too bad; it's somewhat of a drive, but I can still make that trip.</p>
<p>After a few more days (heading into the second week of this madness, now) I had received the receipt in the mail and was on my way to the shop to submit it for warranty. The guy there was friendly and took the board (and box and as many accessories that came with it as I could spare) without a hint of a problem.</p>
<p>Five days later I got a call on my mobile, in the middle of the day, from the manager of this shop telling me that there was nothing wrong with the motherboard. He added that Linux doesn't support SATA.</p>
<p>Now, let's just pause to consider this for a moment. This was entering its third week, while I had been without my usual capable system for over two weeks. I had filesystem corruption that I had managed to partially salvage using another motherboard. I had been using SATA and Linux together happily for <strong>over a year already</strong>. And now you're telling me that the motherboard's fine and Linux and SATA don't work together? ... Are you high?</p>
<p>I told him, in no uncertain terms, that what he had just told me was so much bovine waste. “I've been using SATA in Linux for a year already without problems!” He deflected, saying that he was just the manager and was only relaying what he had been told by the tech.</p>
<p>“Oh, and by the way,” he informed me, “we won't support a warranty on this anyway since you got it from a place that isn't part of our franchise anymore. You'll have to go take it to them.”</p>
<p>Nevermind that I had phoned in <strong>four days before</strong> to check exactly this. I pretty clearly said where I had originally bought it from (while they were still trading under the name of this store) and explicitly asked if it was okay. I was told it would be fine. I asked if the store there was still open. I was told it wasn't anymore, and it didn't matter anyway because warranty claims go to these guys, anyway. If there actually <em>was</em> going to be a problem, why the hell did this moron tell me that there <em>wouldn't</em> be? Why was I told to bring it to these “Linux doesn't support SATA natively” numbskulls, in a location out of my way, when they were in no position to warrant it?</p>
<p>So after that phone call I was too furious to do anything involving interactions with other people. I spent half an hour in the lab, by myself, quietly working on something completely unrelated to try to calm down a bit. Even then I was still fuming. I told my supervisor what had happened and that I was going to take a bit of time out to pick up the motherboard. (He'd never seen me so mad. A day or two later, he told me that I was almost shaking with anger and frustration, and he was being deliberately careful to not say anything that might possibly aggravate me further.)</p>
<p>One 90 minute round trip to the shop and back, later...</p>
<p>They didn't charge me anything, though I knew they could have tried. I'm not sure if they forgot about it or just decided it better to not piss me off any further and rather ignore it.</p>
<p>So the machine was back home. Again I tried my hand at diagnosing the cause. This time I noticed that WinXP didn't seem to have so much of a problem with it as Linux seemed to. Occasionally it wouldn't boot all the way, but usually it seemed okay. It's possible that my testing in Windows wasn't thorough enough, though—certainly it wasn't as thorough as with Linux.</p>
<p>I also noticed that limiting the drive to SATA 150, even while on the ASUS motherboard, seemed to help. Leaving it at SATA 150, it was, for the most part, running fine. Tired of fighting this crap, I began reinstalling Debian, and I was prepared to leave it at SATA 150 rather than 300. But, just in case there was some idea that I had missed, I put the issues to the folks on the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.humbug.org.au">Humbug</a> (my local Unix/Linux user group at the time) mailing list.</p>
<p>I got a few suggestions, but they seemed to converge towards it being a good idea to investigate the power supply. Apparently many weird effects have been in the past attributed to power supplies, and I wasn't aware of that. And not just dodgy supplies, too; someone even mentioned a situation where a PSU, tested to be working fine, was somehow incompatible with the particular case it was intended to be housed in. (For some bizarre, unknown reason, it just didn't work right while in that case.)</p>
<p>So, with that in mind, I tried substituting out the new power supply to see what happened using the old one I had. I couldn't imagine what could be causing errors like these by the PSU, but I gave it a go anyway.</p>
<p>It worked. No problems. No errors. Booting and working just fine. Something about the spanking new mid-range power supply was causing problems that the old bog-standard PSU did not.</p>
<p>I did note that there was something different about this setup as compared to using the old power supply. The old supply had no dedicated SATA plugs, whereas the new one does, and so to use the old PSU I had to use Molex to SATA power adaptor cables. On the new supply, however, I had just plugged the SATA power straight to the dedicated SATA supply lines.</p>
<p>So, for one more time, I tried using the new power supply, but with the Molex–SATA adaptors instead of the dedicated SATA power. It worked. I was running at SATA 300 and without the ATA errors.</p>
<p>Some thorough testing confirmed it. Yep. That was it. That was the problem. The PSU's SATA power cables and the hard drives weren't playing nice. Finally!</p>
<p>Of course, now I wanted to know what the problem with the SATA supply was. I poked around the outputs of the SATA supply cables with a multimeter to see what I could see, and what I could see was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was within spec. Maybe with a current draw it'd be clearer what was amiss. But as it stood, I couldn't work it out any further.</p>
<p>Now it's taken me at least a few weeks to finally restore my machine to about where it was before this all happened. I was able to salvage most of my personal files from the original install that got corrupted, and what wasn't still there I had either a backup of, or it wasn't important enough to worry about. Since this happened, I've put VDR back on this machine, running as my digital TV receiver and PVR device, 24 hours a day. Like I had hoped to do.</p>
<p>I think there are a few morals to be learnt from this story. Some of these everyone should already know, but it's worth repeating:</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>You can't trust support staff to know a whole lot about Linux. (Doesn't support SATA! Right.)</li>
<li>You can't trust sales staff to know a whole lot about their own company. (Sure, bring it in! Even though you bought it at some other place which still exists but isn't part of our brand anymore.)</li>
<li>Using the most appropriate plugs you're given doesn't guarantee that it'll work.</li>
<li>Power supplies can cause some very strange behaviours.</li>
</ol>
<div class="section" id="update-2007-09-01">
<h2>Update 2007-09-01</h2>
<p>I really am a sucker for punishment. Last weekend I got talked into believing that upgrading was a good idea... way too easily. You see, the small 40 mm fans in my system (one on the motherboard over the northbridge, and one in my video card) were making noise. Not loud noise, really, but loud enough to annoy me as I tried to sleep. Particularly the northbridge fan. I thought it would be cool if I had a motherboard without any fans. I knew such existed, but I was wary of doing anything about it, given my previous experience with installing computer parts.</p>
<p>Aside from that, I was considering my options for getting a new, bigger monitor, and upgrading my memory. But it appeared that the DDR RAM that I was after had become disproportionately expensive as everyone moved to DDR2 RAM. Someone suggested that it'd be plenty cheap to just buy new parts to support DDR2, and for some reason I was feeling risky. I took the prompt and picked out for myself some parts: a fanless motherboard that supports DDR2 RAM (Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe), 2 GiB of DDR2-800 RAM (Kingston), a CPU (since, of course, the standard pins had changed since last time I bought a motherboard—I swear, they might as-well just go back to soldering the CPU straight in... anyway: Athlon X2 4400+), a fanless video card (Gigabyte 8600GT), and a monitor (Benq 20" widescreen, which was, perhaps not so surprisingly, the most expensive part).</p>
<p>After pulling out the old parts and putting in the new, things seemed to be going well. I ran it a little, used it to watch some TV, left it on overnight, and it survived okay. Things <em>seemed</em> to be going well. I shut the machine down in the morning since I hadn't gotten the network working for a silly reason (the interface I was trying to use as “eth1” was actually being called “eth3” by udev) and it would've been pointless to leave it running with no way to act as a server, and no TV shows worth recording. That evening I booted the machine up, did some web browsing, and then things started failing with segfaults, crashing, and a buildup of instability. Oh hell.</p>
<p>Without going into much detail (these posts already have far too much of that), I narrowed this problem down to use of the Cool'n'Quiet function of the CPU. After more desperate searching and probing, eventually I figured out that, even though the RAM was passing memtest86+ testing, the voltage setting for the RAM in the BIOS was defaulting to a value lower than what the RAM was actually designed for. It was being undervolted, and was made very unhappy when the CPU changed speed. So... no wonder there were segfaults.</p>
<p>Things seemed to be going well, again, once I pushed the voltage up to the correct level in the BIOS. Everything was running quieter than before the upgrade, and using less power, too. Happiness!</p>
<p>If I weren't such a masochist, one day I might learn to stop doing things like this to myself...</p>
</div>
My home-built personal video recorder nightmare2007-01-28T00:00:00-05:002007-01-28T00:00:00-05:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2007-01-28:/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html<p>It started with an impulse purchase. I was browsing Harvey Norman for one reason or another (I was probably in there to buy some overpriced printer ink) when I stumbled across the TV tuner card aisle. I had been digital-TV-curious for a while—this at a time when digital-TV was still fairly recent—and I was in a buying mood, so I bought a single-tuner DviCo PCI HDTV card. It took a bit of effort to get the software right, and I had to also get myself a long TV aerial cable, but it wasn't too long until I got working TV on my computer.</p>
<p>It was at this point that strange and wonderful ideas began to form in my head. Words like “MythBox” and “PVR” and “TiVo” coalesced, loitered around menacingly, and formed gangs that beat up other words like “easy”, “sensible” and “cheap”.</p>
<p>I considered for a moment what I already had to work with. I had an nVidia video card with, supposedly, video out function. I say “supposedly” because, at the time that I tried it, nVidia's Linux drivers were a bit thin on this particular front. TV out would kinda-sorta work, I think, but probably wouldn't [...]</p><p>It started with an impulse purchase. I was browsing Harvey Norman for one reason or another (I was probably in there to buy some overpriced printer ink) when I stumbled across the TV tuner card aisle. I had been digital-TV-curious for a while—this at a time when digital-TV was still fairly recent—and I was in a buying mood, so I bought a single-tuner DviCo PCI HDTV card. It took a bit of effort to get the software right, and I had to also get myself a long TV aerial cable, but it wasn't too long until I got working TV on my computer.</p>
<p>It was at this point that strange and wonderful ideas began to form in my head. Words like “MythBox” and “PVR” and “TiVo” coalesced, loitered around menacingly, and formed gangs that beat up other words like “easy”, “sensible” and “cheap”.</p>
<p>I considered for a moment what I already had to work with. I had an nVidia video card with, supposedly, video out function. I say “supposedly” because, at the time that I tried it, nVidia's Linux drivers were a bit thin on this particular front. TV out would kinda-sorta work, I think, but probably wouldn't be capable of handling anything tricky like hanging an alternate display off it.</p>
<p>What I also had, though, was an old DVD decoder card: a Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus (H+). This had been working well under Linux for several years using the <a class="reference external" href="http://dxr3.sourceforge.net">dxr3 drivers</a>. Knowing that the TV signal is actually an MPEG2 stream much like a DVD stream, I figured there must be a way to connect it, the DVB card, and my TV under MythTV.</p>
<p>There wasn't, though. Not with MythTV. MythTV assumes you have a true framebuffer to work, and the dxr3 driver doesn't implement a true framebuffer. But I did find an alternative to MythTV that <em>could</em> do what I wanted: <a class="reference external" href="http://www.tvdr.de/">VDR</a>.</p>
<p>VDR is perhaps not the prettiest, most feature rich, or easiest to use PVR software available. Don't get me wrong, it's very good, but at the time it was not as intuitive and ubiquitous as MythTV. It does have one major advantage, though—it supports the H+ card well, via the <a class="reference external" href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxr3plugin/">dxr3 plugin</a>.</p>
<p>After finally figuring out how to actually do cool things in VDR, I was really impressed with what I could then do: record, timeshift, pause live programs, get program info, etc. All with vastly improved picture quality, to boot, compared to my old analog signal. (There was probably an improvement in audio quality too, but the speakers in my TV are extremely ordinary anyway, so that advantage was somewhat moot.) It was a big step up from what I was able to do previously, which was precisely none of those things, and typically with a fuzzy picture.</p>
<p>It didn't take long before I got completely used to using VDR as my PVR, but there were still a few things about my particular setup that were bugging me. My computer lived in my bedroom, and the TV lived in an adjacent room. I needed to have fat, long cables running across a doorway to get signal from the aerial to my computer, and then picture and sound from my computer to the TV. (For some reason the best place in the house for reception by my indoor aerial was literally on top of the television. Who would've guessed?)</p>
<p>The second thing that was bugging me was having to boot-up and shutdown my computer every day just to put something on the idiot box. This was getting annoying. The alternative, of course (short of having the machine wake itself up, which it seemed unable to do by that point), was to leave my machine running overnight, all the time. This would have the advantage beyond just not having to turn it on in the morning, but also that it would be able to record things that interest me even after I'd have gone to sleep.</p>
<p>The problem with that idea, though, was that my computer sounded like a lawnmower. An old rickety case housing some 80 mm fans and the whole setup never considered for quietness, sitting a couple of meters across from my bed, made for an uncomfortably noisy environment that I would have had to try to sleep in.</p>
<p>Then I had a thought (uh oh) which seemed like a fun idea (oh no). “Why not build a quiet, efficient little machine, a kind of MythBox, exclusively to run MythTV-type software and handle all my TV needs?”</p>
<p>I should've just had a lie down and forgotten about it. But instead of doing the sensible thing, I spent a couple of weeks of my holidays feverishly searching the web for information about what I could do to achieve said box. I discovered the <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniITX">MiniITX</a> form factor and was intrigued. Looking around to see what I could practicably get my hands on and what would do the tasks I was proposing, I took copious notes, comparisons, and details.</p>
<p>I had originally foreseen a fanless (and thus extremely quiet) system, with huge hard drive capacity, about the physical size of a DVD player, that would sit on top of my TV, run MythTV 24 hours a day, and record TV, play DVDs, and generally be my super-duper custom-built media centre.</p>
<img alt="The box in question." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/box_skin.jpeg" />
<p>What I actually ended up with was a little bit of a compromise from this ideal—disappointingly I was unable to work out a fanless configuration. The final plan involved a twice 40 mm-fanned (and thus, not so quiet) case—a Morex Procase 2677—and 40 mm-fanned (again, not so quiet) motherboard—a VIA EPIA SP-13000. But, on the plus side, the motherboard had MPEG2 hardware acceleration and TV out, and I was getting a huge 400 GB Sumsung hard drive for storage of recordings and things. I was also getting 512 MiB of 30 mm-tall RAM—importantly, my copious reading revealed that this particular case literally can not fit any RAM that's taller than 30 mm, so I made sure to check the RAM manufacturer's (PQI's) website for specifications before I ordered anything. Some parts I got from AusPCMarket, others from Eyo. The parts all totalled more than AU$800, but my newly approved <a class="reference external" href="http://www.innovation.gov.au/Research/ResearchBlockGrants/Pages/AustralianPostgraduateAwards.aspx">Australian Postgraduate Award</a> meant I could afford it. (I'm rich, ha ha! ...Not really.)</p>
<img alt="The guts of the box." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/box_guts.jpeg" />
<p>The parts arrived sometime in the following week. On the night they arrived, I took them all out and started assembling everything. It didn't take long before I ran into my first problem: The RAM was too tall. A single millimetre too tall. I measured it. Somebody (PQI) lied to me. I was not happy at all.</p>
<p>For now, it just meant that I wouldn't be able to put the DVD drive in its proper place, so I plugged the RAM in anyway. That let me get to the stage of booting something for the first time, and, with Debian install CD in the drive... nothing but motherboard beeps. After some farting around with various things, I eventually worked out that the RAM itself, quite aside from being too big to fit properly, was also <abbr title="dead on arrival">DOA</abbr>.</p>
<p>It occurred to me (after the obvious disappointment and mild rage), “Perhaps I could get Eyo to change it to a RAM stick only 30 mm tall while they replace this bad stick—kill two birds with one stone.” This assumed, of course, that the guys at the other end would actually listen to what I was asking (or even believe me) and actually wanted a satisfied customer, not merely a paid-up one. Ultimately I had assumed incorrectly.</p>
<img alt="The clearance between 30 mm RAM and the DVD drive." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/mem_clear.jpeg" />
<p>In the meantime, I stole a stick of RAM from my desktop machine which just happened to actually be 30 mm tall. It also happened to be matched to a second stick in a dual-channel configuration, so I wasn't keen on this being a permanent solution, but it was enough for the moment.</p>
<p>Over the next while, I installed Debian and MythTV and played around a bit with all that. After much tweaking and farting around I got to the stage of actually being able to watch TV through it. Only, the reception wasn't all that good. Or, more accurately, it was pretty bad—enough to fall right over the <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cliff">digital cliff</a>.</p>
<p>I don't recall exactly how I worked it out—I probably put the TV card back into my desktop machine a tried some things there—but I eventually discovered that, somehow, the DC power block for the Morex case was causing so much electromagnetic interference that my indoor aerial was not enough to get a sufficiently strong signal above that noise for the tuner card to lock onto. I could only get, at best, one channel at a time, so long as I oriented the aerial just perfectly, and that required me reorient the aerial whenever I wanted to change channels. Some channels weren't able to be picked up at all.</p>
<p>In the end, the only time my MythBox would have a clean enough signal to be able to do what it was originally built for was when the whole thing was switched off... at the wall... Brilliant.</p>
<p>It probably would have been enough if I had an outdoor aerial. But I didn't, and for various reasons, I wasn't about to install one. All this was taking place, of course, while I was exchanging emails with the folks at Eyo, where I bought the RAM from, trying to nicely ask them to help me find a stick of RAM really-truly 30 mm tall, and not taller. Pretty much the only response I got through that whole exchange was “Tell us which one you want, and we'll exchange it, for a 15% restocking fee.” Even when I replied specifically saying that I just want one that's 30 mm tall: “Tell us which one you want, and...” Genius.</p>
<p>I was trying to make it clear what I wanted to do: return a stick of RAM that was dead on arrival and <em>at the same time</em> exchange the RAM for something more appropriate, which they would be kind to suggest. I didn't see why I should pay the full restocking fee since, to replace the dead RAM (for which that restocking fee doesn't apply), they'd surely have to go through almost the same motions, anyway.</p>
<p>It was nearing the end of December at this point, and their website claimed they would be leaving on holidays for a few weeks over Christmas. I sent yet another email with the same request, reworded yet again to try to make the point clearer, and when I didn't hear back within a few days I assumed they had left for the holidays and would deal with me again when they all got back in the new year. Over the holidays I looked at what I might be able to do to alleviate the problem with the interference, but that exercise didn't produce anything useful. (Turns out aluminium foil doesn't make such a good electromagnetic shield, though I should've guessed.) It was about at this time when I realised this project was doomed.</p>
<p>It was the new year now, and the guys at Eyo still hadn't gotten back to my last email. Fed up, I emailed them requesting an RMA to return the dead RAM and that, as per their own policy available on their website, they refund it rather than replace it. I got the RMA without hassle and posted the RAM back.</p>
<p>About a week and a half later I got a phone call to my mobile from a guy at Eyo. They were <em>still</em> confused about my situation and what I wanted to do. The call was to let me know that my replacement RAM was ready to be shipped. Yes, they wanted to send me a replacement stick of RAM. (Are these guys illiterate?)</p>
<p>I argued with him for several minutes about not wanting a replacement. He wanted to charge me the full restocking fee. Restocking is not applicable to dead items. He argued that I was late with notifying them. I had notified them within a couple of days of the RAM arriving here—it was their fault that it had taken so long to go ahead and do something about since they made no effort to help me choose a replacement or alternative, and the ball only got started rolling once I inevitably just gave up dealing with their crap. He wanted to at least charge me <em>something</em>, since RAM prices had shifted by this point.</p>
<p>I was sick of arguing and conceded to some small amount being taken off the refund amount. I forget how much, but it was less than the total 15% restocking fee. The amount was credited to my card shortly after. I won't be purchasing anything from Eyo again.</p>
<p>As for my MythBox, for a while its remains occupied space in my spare room. I couldn't use the box because it made too much electromagnetic interference, so it was entirely useless to me at that point.</p>
<p>After some time and some calming down, I thought some more about it and realised that the biggest problem I had with the old system in my loud machine was really the fact that my machine is loud. The other problems were minor—the cables can be taped to the floor for minimal fuss, and everything else pretty much just works.</p>
<p>“So why not,” I thought, “instead of a separate, quiet machine, I replace the loudest component of my machine, the PSU, and get a new quiet case to use? That way, I could leave my machine running 24 hours a day and still be able to sleep. And there's the bonus that this way, once I eventually upgrade from dial-up to broadband, I'll be able to use my machine as a little always-on server, too!”</p>
<p>You would think I would've learned to steer well clear of those kinds of thoughts by now, but you'd be wrong. It foreshadows a whole new set of bizarre problems that drove me mad for another month. Read about them in my follow-up post: <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare-2-peace-and-quiet.html">My Homebuilt Personal Video Recorder Nightmare 2: Peace And Quiet</a>.</p>
The return of the claws2006-08-13T00:00:00-04:002006-08-13T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2006-08-13:/the-return-of-the-claws.html<p>A followup to <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/wolverine-claws.html">Wolverine claws</a>.</p>
<p>My parents quickly became aware of my creation (that is to say, I told them about it, and they had helped out with a couple of things) and they insisted that “Wolverine” make a similar appearance at Dad's 60th birthday party. The theme of this party was different, but it was craftily crafted (the best kind of crafting) so that my costume would still fit.</p>
<img alt="Shelved claws." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/shelved.jpeg" />
<p>Now, the thing is, honestly, the claws barely lasted the party they were originally created for. The blocks between each claws were coming apart, and so I had retired the claws to ornamental duty.</p>
<p>But my parents insisted, so I had to bring them out of retirement. To fix the problem of the loose connections between claws, Dad got his fibreglassing epoxy goo and plastered around the blocks to reinforce them. There was a bit of a problem, though, that after the epoxy set the claws were too close together in a couple of spots. A bit of sanding into the wood with a Dremel fixed that, but it also further weakened the structural integrity of the claws.</p>
<p>The claws were worn again for the party, and they worked well [...]</p><p>A followup to <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/wolverine-claws.html">Wolverine claws</a>.</p>
<p>My parents quickly became aware of my creation (that is to say, I told them about it, and they had helped out with a couple of things) and they insisted that “Wolverine” make a similar appearance at Dad's 60th birthday party. The theme of this party was different, but it was craftily crafted (the best kind of crafting) so that my costume would still fit.</p>
<img alt="Shelved claws." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/shelved.jpeg" />
<p>Now, the thing is, honestly, the claws barely lasted the party they were originally created for. The blocks between each claws were coming apart, and so I had retired the claws to ornamental duty.</p>
<p>But my parents insisted, so I had to bring them out of retirement. To fix the problem of the loose connections between claws, Dad got his fibreglassing epoxy goo and plastered around the blocks to reinforce them. There was a bit of a problem, though, that after the epoxy set the claws were too close together in a couple of spots. A bit of sanding into the wood with a Dremel fixed that, but it also further weakened the structural integrity of the claws.</p>
<p>The claws were worn again for the party, and they worked well. Not as many people picked me this time as last, unfortunately—perhaps it was because the theme was a bit broader than last time, perhaps it was my more subdued sideburns (I didn't have time to grow them fully, not was I as inclined to as the first time), or perhaps it was just a different demographic. Probably all the above.</p>
<p>So, there're my Wolverine claws. They're now resting on top of my bookshelf, with fibreglass epoxy addition, living the ornamental life. I'll be surprised if I ever have an occasion to wear them again. How many times can a person go to a function dressed as Wolverine, anyway? (Assuming you aren't actually Wolverine, obviously...)</p>
Wolverine claws2006-05-31T00:00:00-04:002006-05-31T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2006-05-31:/wolverine-claws.html<p>Back in the days around the time of the release of the first X-Men movie on DVD, I heard that the actor who played Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), in order to fully flesh out the sideburn-awesomeness of the character, had to have extra fake hair pasted on his own sideburns around his ears. Being the virile, hairy young man I was (Still am!), I reckoned I would have little trouble growing the necessary fleece. That is, if I ever had the inclination to.</p>
<p>Several years later I was invited to a costume party, the theme being “Superheroes and Supervillains”. This was the perfect opportunity to test my facial-hair-growing power: I decided to go as Wolverine! So over the course of a month the thin goatee I had was joined by big mutton chops.</p>
<p>But that's not what this article is about. The really cool thing about Wolverine, of course, is not his facial hair. (Though, you have to admit, that is a pretty cool do.) No, the really cool thing is his adamantium claws. Now, in this respect, me not having had an adamantium skeleton grafted to my body at some point during my previous life meant that reproducing the claws [...]</p><p>Back in the days around the time of the release of the first X-Men movie on DVD, I heard that the actor who played Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), in order to fully flesh out the sideburn-awesomeness of the character, had to have extra fake hair pasted on his own sideburns around his ears. Being the virile, hairy young man I was (Still am!), I reckoned I would have little trouble growing the necessary fleece. That is, if I ever had the inclination to.</p>
<p>Several years later I was invited to a costume party, the theme being “Superheroes and Supervillains”. This was the perfect opportunity to test my facial-hair-growing power: I decided to go as Wolverine! So over the course of a month the thin goatee I had was joined by big mutton chops.</p>
<p>But that's not what this article is about. The really cool thing about Wolverine, of course, is not his facial hair. (Though, you have to admit, that is a pretty cool do.) No, the really cool thing is his adamantium claws. Now, in this respect, me not having had an adamantium skeleton grafted to my body at some point during my previous life meant that reproducing the claws convincingly was going to be a bit of a challenge. Nevertheless, I pulled it off. Here's how I did it.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, at the time, my personal supply of adamantium was running low, and when I asked the hardware store if they were getting any in soon they told me to “keep away from the spraypaints”. So, to make do, I chose a cheaper alternative. The claws would be made of wood, something light and only a few millimetres thick, cut, shaped and painted silver. I stole an idea from the movie, and planned on having the claws fit between and around my knuckles with a grip connecting all three claws hidden in my palm. There wouldn't be anything visible from the top side.</p>
<img alt="The workbench." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/bench.jpeg" />
<p>I found some scrap wood pieces with the help of my granddad. We managed to extract a small belt sander from under a big pile of junk in Granddad's garage, and set up a small work area.</p>
<p>Initially I prototyped the claws using cardboard, to find the right shape and size both around my knuckles and of the blades themselves. I cut out a couple of shapes in thick cardboard to get the general shape and size of the blade to something I was happy with. Also, using thin cardboard, I made several shapes that fit snugly in between my knuckles. This took a little bit of tweaking to get just right.</p>
<p>Combining these templates, I drew out six sets of claws onto the sheet of wood. “Enter the coping saw!” I hacked out the shapes, trying to avoid splitting the wood in the process (which, if I recall, wasn't always successful).</p>
<img alt="Basic blunt wooden claw cutouts." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/wip.jpeg" />
<p>With the basic shapes cut out, you can see the claws coming into shape. At this stage, though, they were looking a bit blunt. Not at all like the sharp knife-like edges I was aiming for; certainly not sharp enough to cut through steel, although I had my doubts that steel cutting would be one of the party games (it really wasn't that kind of crowd). At this point is where the belt sander made its mark. There is quite possibly a more sensible way to do it, but instead of doing whatever that was, I just went ahead and sanded the bejeezus out of the claws-in-progress, down to points at the top, bottom, and tip.</p>
<p>I had to be careful here, especially when sanding the tip. The angle of the grain from the way I'd cut the wood meant that as soon as the tip got close to really sharp, it would just break off. It did that a couple of times, setting my progress back a step.</p>
<p>Eventually satisfied with the shape, sharpness, and fit, and as I was running out of wood, the painting began. I bought a can of silver spraypaint to use for this (Hah! You can't tell me what to do, hardware store guy!), but it became evident on test pieces that the grain of the wood was so deep that it would be clearly visible through the paint. I needed some sort of filler that would make the surface smooth enough such that the silver would look reasonably like a smooth metal surface.</p>
<img alt="Sharpened claws painted with a white fill." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/whitepaint.jpeg" />
<p>My first solution was an idea I stole after observing my dad's fibreglass painting adventures. I bought another can of spraypaint: standard white. It didn't really matter what the colour was, but I thought that'd do. By testing on a piece of scrap, a coat of white paint, sanded smooth with fine grain sandpaper, and then coated over again with the silver proved to be quite effective. I applied the strategy to the claws-in-progress, but after a couple of attempts it became obvious that there were some large pits in the wood that were just too deep to be filled by paint.</p>
<p>I couldn't really sand the wood itself down—that'd take far too long and would probably end up making the claws too small. But, I had plenty of sawdust around, and glue. So, I mixed up a sort of sawdust paste and smeared it across the blades of each claw. This had the effect of filling up large pits and making the whole thing easier to sand smooth.</p>
<img alt="One blade." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/blade.jpeg" />
<img alt="One blade being worn." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/bladeworn.jpeg" />
<p>With this sawdust paste, sanded, undercoat, sanded, and silver coat, I had myself a pair of nice looking blade triplets. Constructing crude masks around the silver I had already painted, I sprayed the grip pieces a sandy skin-like colour to make it that much more difficult to see at distance, even if my palm could be seen.</p>
<img alt="Dents left between my fingers from wearing the claws." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/dents.jpeg" />
<p>Incidentally, those grips ended up kinda tight. So tight that the claws stayed put almost totally, even under their own full weight. The snug fits were not terribly uncomfortable, but were tight enough to leave marks between my fingers after taking them off.</p>
<p>So after the blades were done, I had to figure out how to get the three claws on each hand to sit together, and not wave about independently. I had initially envisioned drilling a hole through the palmed part of each claw and pushing a wooden rod through all at once. It occurred to me that this would be both difficult for me to get aligned right, and not really particularly effective even if I did.</p>
<img alt="Claw set on one hand." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/onehand.jpeg" />
<img alt="Claw sets on both hands." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/twohands.jpeg" />
<p>After thinking about this for not very long at all, I settled on gluing and nailing some small wooden chunks between each claw. This also proved difficult to get right, but after some persistence I got it aligned as well as I wanted. It worked altogether pretty well.</p>
<img alt="The finished claws." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/claws/clawpair.jpeg" />
<p>The claws were finished, and all that was left was easy. Some hair work, shaved my goatee, and added some street clothes—jeans, white T-shirt tucked in, belt; I used a shot from X-Men 2 for reference.</p>
<p>Now I was Wolverine.</p>
<p>Incidentally, pretty much everyone at the party picked it straight off, so I must've done something right.</p>
<p>Coming back to the initial question, by the way, I think I know why Jackman needed the extra hair. That's not to say <em>I</em> needed it, but I can see where an easy boost like that would help the overall Wolverine look.</p>
<p>I kept the chops for months afterwards, albeit in a more subdued form. They kinda grew on me.</p>
<p>See the follow-up: <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/the-return-of-the-claws.html">The return of the claws</a>.</p>
Northern territory tour2005-07-20T00:00:00-04:002005-07-20T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2005-07-20:/northern-territory-tour.html<p>Mid-June of 2005, my parents and I were trying to come up with an idea for something to do during my impending summer holidays from study. For some reason having “something to do” during holidays is a good thing, though I can't say I know why that is. Anyway, we came up with a tour of the highlights of the Northern Territory.</p>
<p>We stayed in the flat I use during semester the night before we were to fly out from Brisbane to Alice Springs. Of course, my parents took the double bed in my room, and I was relegated to the spare room with its bed that my feet hang four inches over the edge of. Anyway, with a 5 AM start we rushed to the airport where we got our bags checked, and then waited for an hour or two. It's the thing you do at airports...</p>
<img alt="Overlooking Alice Springs." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/004.jpg" />
<p>A three hour flight, and at about 11 AM local time we arrived in Alice Springs. It's red out there. And dry. And cold, in wintertime. Of course, where-ever there is the slightest hint of water, the vegetation grows and occludes the red dirt—it's only out in the desert that you [...]</p><p>Mid-June of 2005, my parents and I were trying to come up with an idea for something to do during my impending summer holidays from study. For some reason having “something to do” during holidays is a good thing, though I can't say I know why that is. Anyway, we came up with a tour of the highlights of the Northern Territory.</p>
<p>We stayed in the flat I use during semester the night before we were to fly out from Brisbane to Alice Springs. Of course, my parents took the double bed in my room, and I was relegated to the spare room with its bed that my feet hang four inches over the edge of. Anyway, with a 5 AM start we rushed to the airport where we got our bags checked, and then waited for an hour or two. It's the thing you do at airports...</p>
<img alt="Overlooking Alice Springs." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/004.jpg" />
<p>A three hour flight, and at about 11 AM local time we arrived in Alice Springs. It's red out there. And dry. And cold, in wintertime. Of course, where-ever there is the slightest hint of water, the vegetation grows and occludes the red dirt—it's only out in the desert that you can clearly see how red the stuff really is. And the desert isn't all that common in the major townships; mostly it's just arid, which means it's covered in light-brown (and sharp) spinifex.</p>
<img alt="The van." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/148.jpg" />
<p>After arriving we picked up a camper-van rental. The plan was to drive the van around the red centre seeing the sights, then head north up to Kakadu and Darwin to... see the sights there. It was to be our living quarters for the following couple of weeks.</p>
<p>I drew a red line around the roof of the van in this photo. Technically speaking, there are three beds in that van—two on the bottom where the seats fold out, and one up the top (outlined) with a board that pulls out. I say “technically” since this third bed was honestly designed for a child: a compartment six feet in length and two feet high is fine for a kid to clamber into at bedtime, but a six foot tall <em>adult</em> would be forgiven for feeling a bit cramped. Of course, my parents got the bottom beds and I got to crawl and contort myself up onto the ledge above. I could barely fit. The front tapers down and tries to crush your feet, and for the first few nights I was worried that I'd work my way back over the ledge in my sleep and wake up teetering over the edge. That never did happen, but I still got a few-odd bruises trying to get up there.</p>
<img alt="Historical telegraph repeater station." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/006.jpg" />
<p>After getting some provisions for the trip (I had a feeling we were getting too much stuff, but what would I know?) we headed out to the old telegraph repeater station at Alice Springs. This is where people made meaningful beep-beep noises to each other across long distances of wire. Messages used to be transmitted north/south by going through a number of stops along the way where there would literally be a guy listening to the incoming message, write it down, then beep it out again to the next stop. Eventually they worked out an automatic repeater system to do the job (obviously) so it's a historical site now.</p>
<p>We didn't have much time at the telegraph station—they kicked us out as the sun was going down—so we overnighted in Alice Springs. Even with the thirty minute time difference the sun goes down and gets up much later there than we are used to on the east coast.</p>
<img alt="Meteorite craters from a distance." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/011.jpg" />
<p>We started our trip down to Uluru, 450 km southwest of Alice Springs. On the way we made a detour to the Henbury Meteorite Craters. It's a few kilometers off the highway, along a nasty dirt road—the bumpiest, shudderiest, corrugated-est road I'd ever driven on. The only smooth bits were in the soft sandy stuff right at the edge of the road (when they were there at all).</p>
<img alt="Meteorite craters up close." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/015.jpg" />
<p>Once you get to the main crater site (battered and shaken) it's actually quite a big hole in the ground. Think about the thump that would've caused a hundred meter diameter chunk of dirt to be thrown up into the air. That's a big thump.</p>
<p>There's a walk that takes you around the biggest crater, and just to the side of it there are about five smaller craters. Apparently whatever fell down fragmented not far from the ground, and the fragments made their own individual craters.</p>
<img alt="A camel." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/028.jpg" />
<p>On our way out back to the highway we came across a pack of wild camels wandering across the road. You don't find them everywhere out here, but it isn't surprising to see a group or two of them as you hurtle along the highway or over a severely corrugated road.</p>
<img alt="Mount Connor." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/029.jpg" />
<p>Back on the highway towards Uluru, we passed Mount Connor. It's not Uluru, it just looks a bit like it from a distance. It's just as high, but it's a regular dirt and rock mountain that's had its top cut off, or something, and it isn't just a single rock sticking up out of the ground like Uluru. Still strange.</p>
<img alt="Uluru at sunset." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/038.jpg" />
<p>And then we hit Uluru, which us white folks called Ayer's Rock until the Aboriginals were given the land back. The rock is big. Honestly. You have little hope of getting a good idea of just how damn big the thing is from a photo. This was taken from several hundred meters away as the sun was setting—we had arrived just in time to watch the sunset.</p>
<p>We stayed the night in Yulara, a small town just outside the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park that caters to all the tourists. Given the popularity of Uluru, it was unsurprisingly packed.</p>
<img alt="Uluru at sunrise." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/069.jpg" />
<p>Side note: Staying at Yulara, we'd left a bucket under the van to catch the water from the sink as it drained, because we're good mindful travellers, and in our rush to get out early in the morning to see Uluru as the sun rose, we reversed over it. Oops. At least, that's what we think happened, since we didn't even realise it was missing until we tried to find the bucket later that day, long after we'd left the area. (Now we owe the rental company a bucket.)</p>
<p>Anyway, here's the opposite side of Uluru, not long after sunrise. The rock itself isn't as red as some photos would have you believe, it's more orange. Still a bloody big rock.</p>
<img alt="People climbing Uluru." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/070.jpg" />
<p>Looking along a side of Uluru might give a better idea of just how big the damn thing is. Those little dots are people. It's a big, steep climb to the top, and the Aboriginals try their best to discourage people from doing it. Something about it being a sacred site (sacredness has never been a particularly good argument for anything, in my eyes). You can see in the photo how many people actually take any notice.</p>
<p>There are even regions around the base of the rock that you are not allowed to enter or take photographs of for fear of a $6000 penalty. Maybe it's a copyright thing?</p>
<img alt="Kata Tjuta from a distance." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/072.jpg" />
<p>After the sunrise at Uluru we headed out to Kata Tjuta, formerly The Olgas. These are a bunch of rocks about 40 km to the west of Uluru. They're just as tall as Uluru, but they're more spread out and, most importantly, aren't a single chunk of rock, but several chunks sticking up from the earth. I reckon they're more impressive than Uluru but, not being a single chunk of rock above the ground, they just can't get the same recognition.</p>
<img alt="Kata Tjuta's short walk." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/081.jpg" />
<p>We went on the shortest, easiest walk there was, which lead in between the biggest mound, Mount Olga, and another big one adjacent to that. It must've rained recently as there were pools of water sitting inside. These two rock mounds are connected by all the pieces of the rock that have eroded off and other bits and pieces that have blown in. Surprisingly, that's plenty for vegetation to get a hold.</p>
<img alt="Kata Tjuta's longer walk." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/087.jpg" />
<p>Dad and I wanted a different view (Mum didn't want to walk any more), so the two of us briskly went up a different path. Well, Dad went briskly—I was barely able to keep up—but the view from the path as far as we got was quite nice. From here you could see the other mounds that make up Kata Tjuta. A bit more actual dirt has made its way in between these mounds, probably because they aren't as tall, so more vegetation is about.</p>
<img alt="King's Canyon from a distance." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/104.jpg" />
<p>At the end of the day, we drove out towards King's Canyon, about 300 km from Yulara, where we stayed overnight. The next morning we headed out from the caravan park to the canyon itself. It's a canyon—what can I say? There's a big rocky slot in the ground that water tends to run through. I suppose that's pretty canyony.</p>
<img alt="King's Canyon up close." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/099.jpg" />
<p>Lot's of vegetation and pretty red rocks along the canyon walk. Once we'd had a good look around we headed back to Alice Springs, nearly 500 km by road. (It's less in a straight line, but the only passable road goes south, then east, then north, so it's that much longer.) Overnighted there, once more.</p>
<img alt="Rain on the road." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/106.jpg" />
<p>Contrary to popular belief, it <em>does</em> actually rain in the Red Centre sometimes. It started pouring down on us as we headed out to Ormiston Gorge. You can see it all over the road, here, with water running over a floodway in the distance. They don't seem to bother building many bridges in NT; I figure that's because bridges are either not needed in the dry season, or they are likely to be washed away in the wet season. So in the event that it does rain they just let it flow over the road and leave it to tourists to figure out for themselves.</p>
<img alt="Rain on Ormiston Gorge." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/107.jpg" />
<p>Ultimately, Ormiston Gorge got washed out for us. It was too wet to go on any walks (the rain gear we had was useless) so we just had lunch in the van, took a couple of photos of the gorge in the clouds, and then headed back to Alice Springs. We were going to detour to look at the Ochre Pits nearby, but the walking track became flooded just as we arrived. Probably better than it flooding while trying to get back, at least.</p>
<img alt="Long straight boring road." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/117.jpg" />
<p>After another night at Alice Springs we headed north towards Tennant Creek. This was one of the longest stretches of driving of the trip. The roads in this part of the country are insane—you can drive for a good ten minutes towards the horizon at 100 km/h without seeing a single corner or crest in the road. It's like that most of the way from Alice Springs to Darwin, and being signed as open roads, there was no speed limit (which, due to new laws in NT, is no longer the case). The van couldn't do much over 110 km/h, anyway, so that was moot.</p>
<img alt="Devil's Marbles up close." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/136.jpg" />
<p>Along the way to Tennant Creek we passed the Devil's Marbles, a collection of large almost spherical rock formations over a region a couple of hundred meters in diameter. A whole lot of red spherical rocks, most about four meters in diameter sit in piles about the place. It's a bizarre formation.</p>
<p>We spent the night in Tennant Creek, and in the morning headed over to another old telegraph station. See above, they're pretty much the same. Except this one's even more remote.</p>
<img alt="The Pebbles." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/152.jpg" />
<p>After that we headed along another nasty dirt road to the Pebbles. The Pebbles seem to be the same kind of formation as the Devils Marbles but in a later stage of erosion. The rocks are smaller (about a third of the size on average, I would guess), but there are many more of them strewn about over a larger region. I wouldn't be surprised if they were more impressive at the same stage as the Devils Marbles are at now.</p>
<img alt="Mataranka Thermal Pool." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/158.jpg" />
<p>With another 550 km of mind-numbingly straight road, we ended up at Mataranka, where we stayed overnight. Twenty kms out of Mataranka is the Mataranka Thermal Pool. It's very clear and, apparently quite warm. None of us tried swimming in it, though there is a spot where you're allowed to.</p>
<img alt="The clear water of Mataranka Thermal Pool." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/160.jpg" />
<p>The water is so clear in some parts of the thermal pool that you can easily see the bottom a couple of meters below. And then, some of the water is covered in algae and is just a swampy marsh that you can't see through at all. Go figure.</p>
<img alt="Termite field." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/163.jpg" />
<p>Just outside the caravan park is a couple of fields of termite mounds. There are thousands of these mounds, and you can almost judge how far north you've come by how tall the mounds are. The taller the mound, the further north you are. These mounds are all about a meter to a meter and a half tall. No idea where they get all their food from—there aren't that many trees around. Perhaps they're why...</p>
<img alt="Nitmiluk Gorge." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/165.jpg" />
<p>Another 100 km and over in Nitmiluk Gorge we took a short guided cruise up the river through the gorge. Now that we're nearer the ocean the creaks and rivers are seeming fuller. Perhaps it was the fact that we hadn't seen any decent river since we left home, but this one seemed actually reasonably well filled for our arrival.</p>
<p>Mind you, it gets a whole lot more filled than that in the wet season. The entire river is accessible by boat, then, but in the dry (when we arrived) the water is too low, and parts of the river are cut off by rocks on the river bed rising out of the water. We had to get out of one boat, walk along a couple hundred meters, then get into another boat to continue the cruise.</p>
<img alt="Nitmiluk Gorge again." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/180.jpg" />
<p>It's neat to see water actually seeping through and out of the rocks that wall the gorge. You can see it dripping out under rock ledges.</p>
<img alt="Bukbukluk Lookout." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/186.jpg" />
<p>200 km further on the road and into Kakadu National Park, we stop at Bukbukluk Lookout. Interestingly, we expected to have to pay to enter Kakadu, like we did at Uluru, but it turns out that entrance fees have been dropped since December 2004. Chalk another win to procrastination on our part!</p>
<p>The climate here is very much different from that at Alice Springs. It's almost unbearably hot (35 ℃—winter, mind you; if they call that winter, buggered if I'll hang around to see what summer is like), and the vegetation is greener and more tropical. That, and the mozzies are out. The wads of warm gear Mum insisted we pack ended up just wasting space, especially once we entered the heat of the top end.</p>
<p>We spent the night at Jabiru up in the north east of Kakadu. It was about this time that we discovered the van fridge was dying. In the middle of the night it started making loud gurgling noises and stopped cooling its contents, so we had to turn it off and keep it stacked with ice for the rest of the trip.</p>
<img alt="Flying foxes." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/188.jpg" />
<p>While driving out to the Yellow Water Billabong that morning we come across a colony of flying foxes. Same as we have back home. We came thousands of kilometers to see something we've got at home, and end up declaring that our colony is bigger. There's got to be something wrong with that.</p>
<p>Our's <em>is</em> bigger, though.</p>
<img alt="Yellow Water Billabong." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/189.jpg" />
<p>Anyway, another cruise, this time on the Yellow Water Billabong. We saw some crocodiles, some trees, some water, and a bunch of lilies. I wasn't as impressed as I was with the first cruise, and the guide wasted a whole bunch of time on an “audience participation” bit that she could've finished in a third as long. I'm not big on audience participation, but then, the oldies seem to enjoy it.</p>
<p>We took this photo on a walk before the cruise. The walk went beside the river for a bit, then out through nowhere for most of the rest of the way. We went well beyond the point in the path that was actually worth going to, so it's no wonder we were stuffed by the end of the day.</p>
<img alt="Ubirr." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/211.jpg" />
<p>That afternoon we drove to Ubirr right in the very north-east corner of Kakadu. We saw some old Aboriginal creation-myth paintings and listened to a ranger talk about it. The story goes that this god-mother type being came along over the flat, formless land, making hills and rivers, planting trees, animals and people, and as she went along she left this mark in the rockface. Yeah, they didn't paint it—it's a mark left by the creator herself. About as believable as anyone else's creation myth, really.</p>
<img alt="Ubirr sunset." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/221.jpg" />
<p>We stayed there to watch the sunset from high on a rocky outcrop. Very pretty watching the sun shine over the wetlands below. After sunset, rangers kick all us whiteys off—it's literally illegal for us to be there in the dark hours.</p>
<img alt="Mamukala Wetlands." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/231.jpg" />
<p>Another night in Jabiru, then we wandered over to Mamukala Wetlands. It's a big area of swampy marshy wet stuff with thousands of birds swimming and feeding. In the photo are a bunch of the birds of the wetlands, stirred up by some guy in an airboat roaring around. I would've called him a bloody idiot for ruining the atmosphere. I'm not sure what he was attempting to do, but stirring up the birds was, at least, one of the consequences.</p>
<img alt="Big termite mound." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/232.jpg" />
<p>Making our way westwards to Berry Springs we came across the biggest termite mound we spotted during the trip. Don't mind the nerd on the right—that's just me. I'm there for height reference. I'm 1.8 m tall, and the mound is at least twice as tall as me, so it's at least 3.6 m tall. While that's damn impressive, apparently they can get as high as <em>five</em> meters.</p>
<img alt="Berry Springs" class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/233.jpg" />
<p>Eventually we ended up at Berry Springs, and for the rest of the day we did pretty much nothing. It was too hot and we were too tired, so we just lay around recuperating from the last couple of days. Dad went out to the nearby billabong and took this photo. We overnighted in Berry Springs.</p>
<p>The first half of the next day was spent at the Territory Wildlife Park. It's pretty much a zoo of the local flora and fauna. Kangaroos, wallabies, various reptiles, birds, marsupials, plants, etc. The wallabies (and some roos, I think) were in an enclosure that you walked around with them in.</p>
<img alt="Flowers in the Territory Wildlife Park." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/239.jpg" />
<img alt="Darwin coast." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/nttour/241.jpg" />
<p>Finally we ended up at the coast in Darwin. We didn't do much other than wander around the parks at the coast and the shopping areas. Darwin's airport is right in the middle of the city, so sleeping that night was... interesting. Or so I'm told. Every four hours or so planes roared overhead. Or so I'm told. I actually managed to sleep through almost all of it.</p>
<p>The next morning we packed up ready to head back to Brisbane out of Darwin. At the end of the trip we had too many supplies and were busily giving things away and throwing other things out. (I had a feeling we had gotten too much stuff, but what would I know?)</p>
<p>Hectic and somewhat cramped (figuratively and literally), but it was a great trip and wonderful to see the highlights of the Northern Territory. It's definitely a pretty part of the world and well worth seeing—I'll happily keep the photos—but the remoteness and heat is something I wouldn't be able to bear on more than a temporary basis. In that sense, think we did it the right way.</p>