DoogieLabs – Page 2 – Researching Reality

Stingray Corvette Build Day 1

doogie

With my friends moving to North Carolina in a couple of weeks, and a disassembled car that needs to make the drive from Colorado to NC there is only one thing that needs to be done.. LOTS OF FREAKING WORK! heh I believe it's a 1973 Corvette Stingray, the engine was built by my buddy who spent a few years building engines and doing other various things for Petty Enterprises.

Was that… April?

doogie

I'm not completely sure, but I think it was here and gone. What was supposed to be another month of progress in my venture into self employment, quickly turned into rushing to get one thing done after another. I guess I'll take it from the top, the first week of April was bulk trash. A couple of times annually in Thornton people will set out large items curb side such

Vintage Collection- SGI Fuel

doogie

Silicon Graphics Fuel The fuel by many was regarded as a later replacement for the O2. I think that it was definitely a more flexible and expandable workstation versus the O2, albeit still only a uni-processor system. The Fuel was also one of the SGI systems that more closely resembled a PC form factor. The tower is nothing more than a higher quality mid-tower ATX Chassis, but the motherboard shares

Fraudulent City of Thornton

doogie

I used to really like the city I live in, and not all love is lost. The people around here are generally okay. Like any other larger city most people are just too busy going about their business, but everyone is definitely considerate to each other and for at least most parts of Thornton I like to think that violent crime is not an issue. What does such a peaceful

Random Update

doogie

Sales, sales, sales. I have been working hard on getting my SGI Inventory out the door and into the hands of those who can use them. That's mostly what I've been upto this month. Check the eBay and store sections for the latest parts postings. The SGI Fuel's have been flying off the shelves, I can barely list them fast enough. Some other SGI stuff has been hanging around a

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

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

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

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

Vintage Computer Collection: Toshiba Libretto 50 & 70CT

doogie

I first picked up a broken one, then I was hooked and had to have a working one. After a couple of weeks of research I was ready to build my portable vintage DOS Gaming machine. I liked playing SimCity 2000, Simtower, Doom, the original GTA and the like. Modern windows does allow most of these games to run, but many without sound (sound blaster emulation not available, etc.) Then

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

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

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,

100 Posts! Old & New; Fuel Vaporization Experiment

doogie

Since December of 2009 I have been sharing my thoughts and projects using this website. It has come a super long way. It has become quite an archive of history, knowledge, and my abilities. Thanks for visiting, I hope that the information posted and provided here helps out people in their projects or adventures. A few days ago I was able to actually find my old DoogieLabs site on the

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. Everytime 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 the

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

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

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

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

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

VIDEO: $25 46 inch Samsung Computer Monitor

doogie

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

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

VIDEO: SGI Altix 450 Supercomputer Tour and Mini Demo

doogie

Welcome to the SGI Altix Museum page! SGI Altix 450 / 4000 series (Single IRU): 8x 1.6GHz Itanium2 Dual Core Processors for a total of 16 Cores, over 1MB of L2, 18MB of L3 Cache, 533 Frontside Bus. Codename "Montecito" .. 1.7 BILLION transistors per die! (IA-64 Arch) 8GB of DDR2 RAM per Node board, so 32GB total min per IRU with room for lots more NUMA-Link Interconnect that allows

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

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

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

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.

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

Automotive Performance Tip / Tutorial: Headerwrapping your DownPipe; the Why and How-To

doogie

When working on my buddy's Corrado I decided to take the opportunity to teach everyone how to properly use header wrap when wrapping up your down-pipe or header. It's my first real attempt a tutorial video hopefully it is easy to follow and entertaining. Definitely welcome to feedback. Cheers!

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

SunFire V250 Power Supply Repair is complete!

doogie

Here is the video of the repair, I liked how fast the time lapse turned out, it's really cool;

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

Doing more work, more goodies coming!

doogie

Quick silly random update / preview of some stuff coming down the pipeline since I'm off this weekend, whooray! If anyone needs this done on their Sun Machine, please get in touch with me. This will also be added soon once I get the shopping cart all working and in order; Play safe, Doogie

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

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

March Video Blog! whaaa

doogie

That's right, I've got a video setup that finally seems to work a treat, so I've been stepping it up. I figured it out, I could sit here and talk all day long in text that I can do this or that, or I can on the other hand film what I'm actually capable of, and then when I post my ads on Craigslit or hand out a business card

News and Blog for March 29th, 2012

doogie

Whats happening? Lots! First off, I finally finished the tour and full video of the Motorola Mobile Work Stations / Carputers that I have available for sale. I will be using one in the van, and the Corrado. The difference will be that in the Corrado, I won't be using the Motorola screen, its too klunky. So I set one up, and tore one apart! There has been an interest

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

Notes for Brad (v8jagnut) in troubleshooting his SV21 Camry issues

doogie

These are for for brad aka "v8jagnut" on you tube. For those who are unaware he is having issues with this car: Its sad that the shop he took the ECU to diagnosed it as bad. I took a good look at the code charts and diagrams after watching your video, I guess it is possible that it could still be something in the wiring regarding the voltage reference

I wonder how posting from a mobile phone works

doogie

Testing out the android app that interfaces with the wordpress cms. This is pretty interesting I have to admit, I have never been able to construct an entire website so fast before, and be that satisfied with the results. I'm glad that its become as universally possible as facebook to host and maintain my own website. I like keeping my own data on my server, its mine. Facebook and other