Bye bye, Berkeley. Drawing + PC repair + Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

Well,

I'm now (unofficially) a UC Berkeley grad. Still waiting on getting my diploma in the mail, however. Also looking for a job. Anyway, enough of that.

During the last semester I was able to take up drawing. My friend dragged me onto iscribble.net, where I was reluctant to start. I knew I had the typical couldn't-draw-to-save-my-life skills but then realized soon that I could draw humans better than she could, with my mouse. I then started studying color theory, more anatomy, poses, dinosaurs, and even started the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. At one point I was doing a study of facial features, by pencil, and just drew for hours on end, not realizing where the time had gone. Eyes, then lips, then noses, page after page of sketches: some from reference, some from imagination. For the first two weeks, I saw the world in a way I had never seen before, everything looked brand new to me.

There was a point where I did nothing but draw, for two weeks. After that I came to my senses and started doing schoolwork again, but then after about October or so (when I had finally purchased a graphics tablet, ironically), I stopped.

Here's an early iscribble work (yes it's terrible, this is before I studied color as well): my first time drawing a dress. Since it's early it's very cartoony (I started anime-style since everyone was doing it on the board) but have since then begun learning realism. I was still struck at how I was able to spew this onto my screen, where I could only spew stick figures before.


In other news, I was at a LAN party recently, where a good friend of mine whom I had not seen in a while had a broken power supply. I had read up on capacitors going bad and had my suspicions. It was a Cooler Master 550 watt, and for a while it had to be plugged in for hours before the PC would turn on. After that it just quit.

I looked at it for a while, and sure enough, there was a busted cap. The cooling fan was also very much stuck with dust, and one of the toroids had burned through its cloth-like shroud. I bought it off him for $5.

I had an extra 120mm cooling fan laying around, but no extra 2200 uF 10v capacitor. I was about to order some (no point in buying just one online, right?) when I remembered I had an evil Bestec power supply in an old emachines I had laying around. It wasn't broken, but it had claimed the lives of two motherboards before I searched about them and learned of their destructive 5v rails. I ripped it open, by removing the screws with a philips screwdriver, and found a 2200 uF, 16v cap with the correct lead spacing! I slapped that into the CM550 with a soldering iron and bam, working power supply! Tested on my system (risky, I know, but it passed the false-on test displaying all the necessary voltages confirmed by multimeter) and it seemed stable. The Bestec had some busted, leaky caps so I still don't trust this CM550 completely, but I now have a backup psu that may see action soon for a backup computer if I get my hands on a cheap 775 proc anytime soon.

More on the tablet, a sort of pseudo-review:

Once again, this is the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. Please forgive my lack of a tripod. Digital artists everywhere seem to swear by Wacom, and the friend who had gotten me into drawing in the first place had a Bamboo Pen. The Pen and touch features twice the resolution, four buttons on the tablet, a pressure-sensitive eraser on the pen, and it is also a touchpad. Right off the bat: the touchpad is terrible. It may be inherent to the device or it may be the drivers, I don't know. I just know it's sluggish, unresponsive, and a tiny bit of sweat on the tablet from intense drawing registers as constant input to it. Thankfully it can be turned off.

Drawing on it is great, however. I thought I was going to use it in relative mode but absolute mode is wonderful, I can get to where I need to be on the screen with incredible speed. I wore a flat to the tip in less than a week! This caused some awkward scratchy sounds until I realized the tip is simply friction fit and you can pull and reposition it. I rotated it 180 and it's fine now. Just like a pencil that you can't sharpen, you should wear the tip evenly and rotate it from time to time.

In Gimp and Sai the pressure sensitivity is recognized, as well as the separate eraser. If I'm on iscribble I get neither but that's understandable. What's odd with iscribble is that it's insanely laggy on Windows 7, maybe from all the different features aimed towards tablet PCs that are loaded and active while it's plugged in. It is unbearable. I boot up Fedora and while it took a bit of work to get the drivers working, it is lightning fast. However, drawing in Gimp in Fedora occasionally misses a stroke, I'm going to assume it's the drivers for that fault. Linuxwacom (driver package) doesn't even recognize it as a Bamboo Pen & Touch, it reads "Wacom BambooFun 2FG 4x5" under devices, but I suppose it works well enough.

Regarding the aspect ratio of the device, it is 16:10, which mapped perfectly onto my 16:10 22", but now I'm on a 16:9 24", with proportions forced. A small amount of the tablet is unusable as a result. However, it's nice that you can select which monitor and what portion of the monitor to map to. This is done in Linux with a couple commands in the shell (and some simple pixel math), whatever, I wrote a script to take care of it.

Although ironically I almost stopped drawing soon after I got this tablet, I'm starting to draw again and am glad I got it.

FORMULA SAE

I guess it's way past due for an update.

The 2010 California Formula SAE competition has just finished yesterday. It was one crazy ride. So intense but so much fun. It is also so refreshing and interesting to see the other cars from schools all over the world.

I took some pictures but didn't opt to bring my camera, so they're crappy camera phone pics, for better pics search for "Cal Racing" on facebook, but our historian hasn't uploaded any pictures/videos at the time of this writing (he's probably on his way back home right now).

While I wanted to get involved in a number of things on the team, I ended up doing wiring. I started with some chassis fabrication (tube grindin'!), and general tasks during engine dyno testing. I've always enjoyed wiring, but have never focused this much on making a safe, reliable, and attractive final product. I have learned so effing much about automotive wiring, but I'm still a rookie and there is much more. I really do wish I could get into other disciplines like chassis, suspension, engine, composites, at least a little bit with the little time I have left on this team.

I regret so much not joining immediately freshman year. I have never worked this hard for anything in my life, and my job isn't even that hard.


Auto Club Speedway


Some of my wiring


University of Illinois - Urbana


University of Oklahoma


UC Berkeley getting worked on


Vellore Institute of Technology [India] (University of Leeds members shown also)


University of Leeds [UK] (Vellore Institute of Technology members shown also)


Montana State University - Bozeman


University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign (University of Alberta 2009 car visible on right)


University of Saskatchewan [Canada]- Tech Inspection (UC Davis visible in background)




Universidad Autonoma Estado Mexico - Tech Inspection
Crazy bodywork!


Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology [India]- Tech Inspection

SPEAKER update

Here is the LM386 referred to in the last post, hastily hacked together

I think I will remount it, perhaps on the top? back?

And here is a sneak preview of the PORTRAIT OF A KROGAN my roommate painted in its incomplete form. Once I mount this badass speaker/portrait, and once my other roommate, the photographer, takes some good shots of it, I'll post the finished version.

I wish I had 4 more for a "hidden" 5.1 setup.

Mass Effect is so much fun. I simply must resist buying Mass Effect 2 until Spring Break, I MUST!

SPEAKERS!

WOW it's been quite a while. I suppose that's okay, last semester was pretty busy. No one reads this anyway.

Well, I recently picked up a Gakken "Learning for Adults" (or was it "Science for Adults"? I don't remember, it was in Japanese) magazine with a kit to build a 7 cm fullrange SPEAKER! I'm not talking about build a speaker box and throw in a driver, I actually assembled the driver! It was mostly gluing but there was some careful positioning involved too.

I had been wanting to get some fullrange drivers and try my hand at making some interesting speaker cabinets that help get the best sound from single drivers.

I was too excited to take pics during the build stage, so here are some pics of the finished product (courtesy of David). I built a total of three speaker enclosures out of CARDBOARD. It's uncanny how you can modify sound from enclosure design. (Box 1 omitted because it really was just cutting a hole in a box and throwing the driver in, these were built piece by piece).

Box 2
I've decided I don't like gum tape on speakers (not messy like this anyway).




Box 3 (Design taken from the magazine)

Look at that maze of a speaker! Really helped the bass.



Beautiful.


I also threw together an amp with an LM386 low-power speaker opamp I had laying around as well as other parts I also just had laying around. It's still in breadboard form if you can't tell from the pics. Sounds pretty good for cardboard and batteries!

On the note of sound quality; I thought I had been exposed to 90% of what Hi-Fi had to offer. I've listened to most of the top headphones from the top companies, and I've demoed a vinyl/tube amp/loudspeaker setup complete with actively-shielded cables at a Hi-Fi store that one could sell to buy a pretty nice car, we're talking baby supercar. The room was even set up with diffusers and bass traps, the works. Yet there's something about this single driver, especially in the MIDS on vocals, that is just brand new to my ears, like nothing I've heard before. I don't believe I've ever heard vocals so true.

Frequency response was a bit off, however. There seems to be a region in the spectrum missing from the speakers, somewhere in the low mids or high bass. This is probably a consequence of speaker design, material (CARDBOARD, I need to start working with MDF), the driver (<3", most fullrange cabinets I see are for 4" fullranges), etc.

I think I've stumbled upon the subject for my Spring project...

Oh and maybe an amp too, since there always has to be something electronic.

FORMULA SAE

So it's official, I've joined Cal's Formula SAE team! I only have a few days experience working with them, but so far I love it. The people are great and I cannot WAIT to see this year's car up and running (which won't happen until next year, probably). The pic is of me in the car from the last competition, blurry because my cameraman didn't take into account my cameraphone's delay when snapping it.

The new engine is supposed to be dyno tested this weekend, I wonder if I'll get to see it, or more importantly hear it.

Why haven't I done this sooner? I haven't really done much with any club at Cal but I can see myself spending 80% of my weekends helping out with this. I loved metal shop in high school (I took metal 2 twice, never learned TIG though, which is hurting me right now), I love modifying/driving my RC car crazily, and I drove my Corolla wagon a little too ridiculously in high school. The only bad thing is I really can't pull myself to do work after coming home from the shop on the weekends since I'm so tired (or maybe that's just an excuse).


If you haven't heard about the UCwide "walkout", well, here is a pic I took from what happened at UC Berkeley. It was so massive I could barely hear what was going on, but the chanting/shouting was kinda fun.

If I get time/energy this weekend, maybe I'll post pics of my laptop speaker repair (it hasn't happened yet by the way, and yes I teased at it during the last post). I took apart my laptop and took them out, and to my surprise, it still works great! However, I ended up with an extra screw, which was very unsettling. I spent an hour partially taking it apart and putting it back together to try to figure out where it went, in the end I guess it's nonessential. I'll have another chance to figure it out soon though, during the repair.

2nd Cardboard Shelf!

This has been done for a while, and I have been a bad blogger, I've neglected to update. I updated, but I updated on facebook. To be honest I don't think anyone visits this blog anymore; especially after nearly 2 months with no updates, the latest being about how I'm running every other day now (still am though!).

Here is the album on facebook. The link should work for everyone regardless of facebook membership status-at least that's what it tells me. Oh-I just found out this nulls any notion of anonymity on my part, but that's okay.

The gum tape REALLY brought out the front, it just looks GREAT, compared to the last shelf. The last shelf was "sealed" with strips of brown paper bag lined with wood glue.

I might be repairing my laptop speakers this weekend if any readers are interested in seeing an MSI Megabook S262 teardown; but it's just a simple cable replacement, nothing too noteworthy.

That's it for now.

C25K!!!!!!!!!

It's official, I've begun the Couch-to-5k running program! A friend of mine linked it to me, and the intro made perfect sense:

"Too many people have been turned off of running simply by trying to start off too fast. Their bodies rebel, and they wind up miserable, wondering why anyone would possibly want to do this to themselves."

The last time I tried taking up running was by treadmill at the school Recreational Sports Facility, Fall 2008. I really did wind up miserable, the only thing keeping me going was my persistence and the satisfaction of a mirror (and a girl, surprise surprise). I was doing okay, at 6 days/week (I lasted a couple of months as well! And this was with weightlifting too), but I was pushing myself to the extremes, exhausting myself and torturing the hell out of my lungs. I always dreaded it.

Now running is fun! The program calls for 3 runs/week, I've done 5 so far this week! Granted, I've only just finished the second week, but I think I'm making good progress as each transition feels smooth and easy.

Running outside around town, parks, and residential areas is so much fun! There's still a lot of places in this city I haven't seen :D

I bought this the first day:

Purchased at Tuesday Morning (yes I'm cheap), on a Tuesday Morning lol. I realized I didn't have any kind of digital watch, and the program requires a way to measure either running distance or time. Also, as you can see, the wristband is interchangeable. It was either this or a USC digital watch, which would have misrepresented me greatly lol.

The wristband reminds me of Keith Urban, who I had just seen the weekend before the Tuesday in concert with Sugarland. Coincidence? lol. I wonder why he always wears it, maybe his extreme shredding (yes he can shred, I bet he could do metal if he wanted to) causes his forearm and hand to sweat a lot.

Also, I bought some blue Sheaffer ink and a Sheaffer calligraphy fountain pen (which was ridiculously cheap at $6, no converter though D:).

Looking through my notebooks, I think I'm improving greatly (although I don't really write down anything meaningful, I practice by writing whatever I'm listening to at the moment). Credit for top stanza goes to Brad Paisley, the bottom line from Queen. The paper is a Clairefontaine notebook.

The ink is quite... thin. It's a perfect match for the gold-ish fountain I got for my birthday in this post, since it seems to have a bit of a problem in the flow department with my other inks (it was nearly impossible to get a good line with the included ink cartridge!). The flow is nice and even now, and more importantly: reliable. The calligraphy in that post is just hideous now that I look at it.

This calligraphy thing is so addicting! I need to learn a new font.