Author: doogie

Mechanique' Extraordinaire

SGI Stuff March!

doogie
I picked up a large lot of SGI stuff that was about to be trashed, and have been working to restore everything back to fully functional condition and then listing it up online. If anyone is interested in an SGI Fuel or Octane and wants it personalized just let me know and we can work something out. I expect to have everything setup and listed by Wednesday on eBay with
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It’s going to be a busy month!

doogie
New Online Shopping Cart has been setup! I have been working hard at getting a real online store front end setup on this site. To a point it is for testing and self education, if someone needs a site with a good online shopping cart and doesn't want to pay a pretty penny, I have figured out just the solution that will work. With that being said, the online store
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Late January update!

doogie
SGI Fuels are now in stock! Well things have been kind of slow in the way of progress of personal projects because I have been busy trying to get my stuff together and listed on eBay. I recently made the next round of purchases of computer equipment and a bunch of it will be listed up very soon. If you are looking for a laptop or an SGI Computer this
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Doogie, what the shibobbies are you doing to your site?

doogie
If you read my last post (if you were even able to) you'll notice that things have been slated for a change here on the server. Before moving any other websites to the virtual host configuration scenario I must do some testing first. I figured in this case it would be easiest to just monkey around with it on my production site, and it has produced some rather, well, interesting
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Happy New Year! / Janurary Update

doogie
Happy new year! With 2013 now here and the fact that we're all still alive, we can focus on things other than holiday stuff. Back to the grind. What's up with me? It has been sometime since I've blabbered on about some sort of update. I thought about making a video one but at the same time I'm not sure that people would enjoy my YouTube being cluttered up with
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Initial Fuel Vaporizer design and testing

doogie
You've heard aboutfuel injection and carburetion, what about vaporization? Running an engine on nothing but fuel vapors is definitely not a new idea. People have experimented for ages (as early as 1930, maybe even earlier.) with various methods to optimal fuel delivery into an engine. The two most popular methods we use today to fuel engines are systems designed to carefully meter the amount of fuel entering an engine. Liquid
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New DoogieLabs Solaris Tools!

doogie
DoogieLabs Solaris Tools v0.2 has been officially released! Solaris Tools now includes Solaris Backup Utilities version 0.93! After some more adjustments the program now sits just over 3,000 lines of code. most features are working and just needs further testing and ironing out of bugs. Actually short of the logging and a couple of minor things it's almost time for version 1.0! There are a couple of additional menu options,
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Vintage Collection: Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000

doogie
 Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000 [DoogieLabs Vintage Computer Collection] I picked up an Enterprise 3000 that had been sitting at the recycle for a few months. Every time I saw it I passed it up because I couldn't spend a great deal of money on something that's well, useless. However, this very last time it was made available to me for what basically amounts to scrap value so I finally accepted
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How your freezer fixes Hard Drives, and more!

doogie
Beware, this can cause damage to your drive just as much as you may find it helps: As outlined on page 2 of this article here. .. For those who want to lecture me about the condensation problem, see the very last tidbit. I have told many people over the years the successes I've had with getting data off of failing drives by putting them in the freezer. There are
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News and ramblings 11-27-2012

doogie
The site looks a little bit different? Indeed, I was actually able to take some time and get some material posted up which is very nice. I basically sat at home over the entire holiday weekend and messed around with computer stuff. I did some performance tweaking on the server, a little bit more programming, installed an OS on an old Alpha machine, and a few other things. It was
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Motorola MW800 Tour & Resources

doogie
Motorola MW800, Tour and Information Resources: Once in a while I am able to obtain a batch of these magnificent machines, and when I do I sell them. Here is some information I have to share: For those who cannot watch the above video; the Motorola MW series are mobile workstations commonly used in Police cars and City vehicles. They have other uses is many industries requiring rugged computers. For
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Vintage collection: Apple Powerbook 1400cs

doogie
The Apple Powerbook was a series of laptops made in the late 80's through the mid to late 90's. They all feature either an old Motorola 68030, 040.. Or a PowerPC CPU. Apple was known for a number of innovations resulting from the powerbooks over the years. Including power eject PC-Card slots, and CD-Drives. This PowerBook 1400cs is the world's first production laptop to include a CD-Rom drive. It was
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Solaris ZFS Fun!

doogie
I have been working to make some fundamental changes to the DoogieLabs site and server. It was recommended to be by a friend to check out ZFS, he said I had no idea what I was missing. He was very right indeed, and after some research I uncovered something additional. No standard RAID 5 is actually reliable, especially the metadb version that I was using with ufs. CLICK HERE for
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1982 Yamaha XS 850 Cafe Racer Intro

doogie
So I got a new bike.. I put my stereo up for sale on Craigslist, and was offered the below as a trade. This picture is the original cell phone picture taken by the previous owner. After doing some quick research I decided to go for it and snagged a truck to pick it up. [caption id="attachment_1013" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Picture that was originally sent to me when considering purchasing the
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Powerball Lottery Software Coming Soon

doogie
Every inspiring programmer needs good projects to sharpen his or her skill set. I decided that a lottery program would be a great way to play around with some new functions, and learn about the random number generator in c++. One night I was poking around the Powerball website and found the past winning numbers. I then realized that the winning numbers text file download link never changed from the
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DoogieLabs Solaris Tools

doogie
DoogieLabs Solaris Tools & Utilities Current Release: Download Solaris Tools v0.2 / December 2012 Older Releases: Download Solaris Tools v0.1 I have been using some of these tools with my Solaris box ever since I got it initially, and now that I've worked hard on a backup program I figure I can release it and allow for people who want to use it on their Sparc Solaris box. How to
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HOWTO: Setting up the RSC Console

doogie
Setting up the RSC Console Some sun servers include what's called an RSC Card. RSC stands for "Remote System Control" and provides a way to "white switch" a server without actually having to be at the facility it's located at. The RSC Card is basically a self contained computer containing serial ports, ethernet, and a modem. One serial port is linked to the system directly, and allows access to the
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Upgrade for the V880!

doogie
I got the cable in that I have been wanting for a very long time. . I decided to make a video of the installation process, pretty neat! I ran a UnixBench routine at the end for a real world filecopy example. I have noticed that there is a slight performance hit when copying to the raid versus a  a single disk. I suspect that this is because it is
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Late Sept News Part I and SGI Woes

doogie
SGI, HPC with cost as no object; but what did reliability cost? SGI has been a very interesting new road for me, it was the better part of 10 years before I was able to clinch ahold of Octane2 un-obtainium. After gaining a better understanding of how the Octane / Onyx racks work with their NUMA Link and Crossbars, I knew that I wanted to have one as a server.
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News and Blog for September 5th, 2012

doogie
With the Sun Server at home, work has been a bit crippling especially when combined with moving. As some of you know, I have been using SunRays in my shop ultimately consolidating the number of full computers I would need running around the place. Now I have found myself in a situation where I'll be working in a separate place completely on electronics design, computer issues, etc. I want a
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pbzip2, Multithreaded bzip2 application

doogie
Since I have a MASSIVE amount of parallel processing at my disposal it can come in real handy when working with extremely large files. This week I recovered a full terrabyte drive that had a completely hosed NTFS partition on it. After dd'ing the entire disk into an image and recovering the files it's time to format the drive an put our recovered data back onto the disk. The corrupted
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A moment in vintage computers

doogie
One of the items that was included with my last pallet of stuff that I picked up was a new in box vintage IBM Thinkpad external CD-Rom drive. This is an option that you just don't see anymore, so I figured I'd make up a video and share. I have another video coming up soon as well. I wanted to finish editing but due to recent events the server had
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Blog and news for Sunday, August 6th 2012

doogie
Well hello hello Not too much to report, started moving stuff out and scrapping that last of the junk that's laying around here so I don't need to take it with me anywhere. I have been working on potentially securing an office space downtown but with both bank accounts empty I really don't know how things are going to work out. Maybe a miracle, maybe I'll make it on my
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Blog and news for Friday, July 22nd 2012

doogie
Maintenance Notice! The Icebox server will be moved to a new location no later than August 31st, 2012. We expect the move to take a few hours and there will be minimal service interruption. We expect the move to take place on a Sunday evening. Please continue to check back and I'll post an exact date and time once arrangements have been made. Whats up! Things have been very busy
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White Corrado Lives Again!

doogie
After a few years of sitting waiting for some new parts, the car finally lives again! The car was a little grumpy to get started, after having issues with the fuel pump wiring, and replacing some missing relays it fired up. After it was warm and I checked for leaks I went ahead and shot a video. It's a little hard to get started warm since there is no "TPS"
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How to read and write data from and to tapes in Solaris / Unix / Linux

doogie
I did not write this myself, This lovely howto was originally located at: http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/hvoss/TapeHowto.html .. However since it was wiped clean off their website I decided to re-post everything in its entirety here. Thanks Hauke for writing such a wonderful how-to probably a very long time ago. To everyone else, enjoy :-) This How-To describes the commands to be used to write data on a tape and how to retrieve
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LCD Monitor has been repaired!

doogie
My Prized 25" Flatpanel monitor lost it's back light about a month ago. As it turns out, one of the CCFL tubes ended up getting a short in one end. The short caused the panel to get really hot forcing me to run the display at reduced overall brightness, and then the problem got worse when it started to take multiple attempts to get the display to come online. The
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News and Blog for Monday, June 11th 2012

doogie
PAYPAL SHOPPING CART UPDATE: I have been made aware of an issue with the PayPal shopping cart where when you click on the checkout button you are left with a blank page. After combing the server logs on this issue and finding nothing, I finally caught a break last night when testing in the latest internet explorer, it gave me an error message regarding opening a secure page in a
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News and Blog for Tuesday, May 22nd 2012

doogie
Working away getting more done. I have some new stuff to share, I have picked up some vintage computer goodies. I am now the proud owner of a pair of functional Silicon Graphics machines (Octane 2 and O2) which [caption id="attachment_606" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="I may be in windows, but most time is spent in Solaris"][/caption]             I also haven't really shared my new alarm panel
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News and Blog for Thursday, May 7th 2012

doogie
Back after a very hard week! Some of you may have noticed that last week the icebox server was down and unavailable for use. This was actually a result of my boneheadedness in thinking that a 25watt PCI card is some how hot pluggable. Compound this with being sick at the beginning of the week, so that brings us to story time: As many of you know I have been
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Power supply cap order list

doogie
So this is more my personal notes, buuuuut then I thought about it and this may actually be handy to someone else wanting to fix an expensive power supply. This is the list of Capacitors and values that one would need to order up when recapping this power supply. Use your ESR meter, you'll likely find the larger filter caps okay, but the small 2.2µ, 4.7µ, and 10µ will not
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News & Blog for Tuesday, April 3rd 2012

doogie
Whats up everyone! Summer is getting closer, its nice to see it consistently warm outside. Then with yesterdays snow, I was reminded how much I REALLY like it when it's warm outside. I really hope that it's here to stay. Does anyone remember Pine, or alpine? This may seem a little weird but I'm still a fan of using the txt console for everything. Burning CDs, e-mail, web pages, its
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News and Blog for Tuesday, March 20th 2012

doogie
Whats up all!   I have been pretty busy with stuff here at the shop. I have had a few repair jobs, and a couple of unforeseen projects. The first repair job is recovering or resetting the BIOS password in a Dell Inspiron 1000 series. Since there is no security chip on this particular machine, and the password is stored on the eeprom that holds the bios itself, I actually
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What the whole thing changed again!

doogie
I decided to change up the site again to something a little more user friendly. I wanted a CMS that is flexible, popular, and multi platform. So I found word-press. The software seems really secure, and nothing is without its give and take. There are a couple of things that I have needed to adjust to make this possible, but so be it. This software is worlds easier, and that
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Critical Mass

doogie
So I found out that more rent is owed at the shop than I was expecting since my partner backed out. I am ready to sign the new lease, but need to get this paid first. Time to kick it into high gear! I am a bit of a slacker in getting the tour video of the mobile PCs finished, but have listed them on Craigslist. I have listed the
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Work goes on

doogie
Another Corrado has made its way into the shop, the motor was received new piston rings and bearings from me in 2008, was driven 20 miles and has sat ever since awaiting shift linkage and axles and some other details. The time has come to finish this one up, since its much closer than the Black car. Anyone remember this video? Since I have upgraded all the parts in my
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New Video! Tour of my SunFire V880

doogie
I decided to post up a video showing the ins and outs of my Sun Server. I am actually almost finished up with everything on it. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE THAT HAS THE SUN PCi II Drivers PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP! I cannot find them anywhere online thanks to a once awesome computer company going out of business. Anyways, enjoy: I am also working on a video for the
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New Arrivals!

doogie
I awoke extra early to pick up the DoogieLabs goodies, a little addition to the inventory. I know that PC Servicing is not going to completely cover the bills, I found a deal that I couldn't pass up and picked up 18 police car computer workstations. 1.8Ghz, 512Mb Ram, 40GB HD, completely loaded with features like wireless and video capture for the dash cam. Each computer has a touch screen
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New Server!

doogie
So with the Server issues that I have had it got me thinking about more expensive hardware, the good stuff. Computers that are meant to be servers, designed with fault tolerance and built with decently branded components to avoid the cap explosion that killed the Powerhouse server, and the generation of server before that. I do get that to some degree I will never be able to avoid these issues,
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It’s back up!

doogie
Finally got the server back up and running, it blew ALL of the capacitors! yuck Here is a shot of the load testing, seemed to work just fine. It was not very fun to fix, this is the SECOND DELL that has taken a shit on me when used as a server. I am finally fed up, even though it's fixed and will probably last forever, I think it's time
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Setup a Repeater to create an instant wireless hotspot from out of reach networks

doogie
Everyone needs wireless, sometimes around town there are wireless hotspots left open at shops, libraries, and other places that you can connect to. Sometimes you may find yourself across the park but out of wireless, or maybe youre someone who has a large plot of land and wants to get wireless at an outbuilding, or to control a robotics project. Here is a solution that can be had with a
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