I got home from work (and last minute Xmas shopping) last night to find that my natural gas had been shut off despite my having made an electronic payment the previous Thursday (thanks sooo much Bank of OK for futzing around!).

Knowing that I’d already paid the damned bill I did the logical thing, and tried to turn it back on at the cut-off valve next to the meter: no dice!  No gas would flow.  So I fired up the electric blanket and put on a sweatshirt for the rest of the evening (only got down to 40F or so) and called the gas company after they opened again in the morning. 

I did find out how they’d dudded my natural gas when they reconnected it:  the pillaging bastages, in addition to just turning off the cut-off valve (shown circled in red, on = the lug aligned with the pipe, as shown) also installed a plug, in the form of a little disk, under the outlet pipe of the gas meter (that would be the pipe at the upper right of the meter, circled in green).  All it took was a quick twist with a pipe wrench.

If you ever do need to turn your gas back on in an emergency, don’t forget to check for that sneaky little plug (and remember to use some soapy water to check for leaks afterward).  The meter will record your “purchase” either way, but you won’t have to wait for The Man to show up, especially since you already paid, right?

I’d enjoyed BoingBoing for some time before an unforturnate misunderstanding happened there, so I’d been holding off on consuming any of Cory’s fiction for a while.

The reviews I’ve read of “Makers” finally wore me down (that and a link to the free e-book posted at another of my favorite blogs).  So I’m like, okay I’ll give it a try (picture the old “Life” cereal ad: “I’m not gonna try it, you try it!”).

So, I’m like 30 pages in and I’m identifying with several characters, chiefly Suzanne Church, the 40-something “embedded journalist” covering the rise of a disruptive technology wave.  Being barely 40-something myself, with a brief stint at journalism.. and I work with young engineers that sometimes want to hear tales of the “olden times”.  I live this character’s viewpoint frequently.

On page 29, Tjan, a new business manager that’s just joined “Team Perry&Lester” sez:

“The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can’t stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and reinvention too”.

That is something like I was told by the Big Boss at the first electronics company I ever worked for when I was asking about patenting a really neat hack to get around a discontinued chip used on the TVRO systems we made (it was a brilliant hack, replacing a legacy PLL chip with some MECL logic and some discretes: there, I geeked out).  Boss Ed wisely said something to the effect of “don’t screw with patents unless there’s at least 12 million bucks on the table”… and truer words were never spoken.

Patents are worth exactly what you can spend enforcing them; better to invest the effort in keeping your product continually cooler than anyone that wants to rip off your previous work.

So, I’m liking the book so far, and will update as I read along.

This is a blog about tinkering and Making and stuff.

Anything other ends up here.

But, don’t go there.  I’m separating the Creative from the Reactive this way for a reason.

One of the the worthless cats* woke me up too early, so I ended up re-watching a favorite old film, “A Boy and His Dog“.  It never fails to cheer me up or chill me out!

A minor snip of Wikipoedia on it:

Blood’s opinion of the human race is not generally positive, and Blood is somewhat of a misanthrope. His opinion of humans may have something to do with the fact that Blood is most likely the most intelligent and learned living thing left in the world, and he looks down upon the “stupidity” of humans. In addition, Blood notes that “human sex is an ugly thing”. Blood does however have a more positive outlook on life in general, and believes in a place untouched by nuclear radiation he heard about from a police dog. Blood refers to this place at various times as “Over The Hill” and the “Promised Land“, where “deer and the antelope play and it’s warm and clean and we can relax and have fun, and grow food right out of the ground.” Blood wants to look for “Over The Hill” with Vic, but Vic does not entertain it as a sensible suggestion. Vic states that their current situation is as good as it gets, and there is no “Over The Hill.”

What can I say,  except to mention that:

• • “Harlan Ellison is God” (or at least should be)
    
  • Footage from “A Fistfull of Rawhide” is featured
  • I’ve got to expand that Wiki entry
  • I don’t know another film with both both Jason Robards and ‘Mr. Kimble’ from “Green Acres” in it (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I keep it on the DVD stack next to “Harold and Maude“, “M” and other classic films.

____________________________________________________________
* worthless, that is, until I need an emergency food source.  “The secret is in the marinade!”

(C’mon, you knew I was gonna say ‘Well let me count the ways‘, didn’t you?
All  the outrage that follows is couched in light of the limitations of the WordPress interface.
WordPress is free, so they aren’t disrespecting their customers every moment of every day and
charging them thousands of dollars for it).

So, I’ve been fighting with Mentor Graphics’ DX Designer for the last week or so.  I’d been using Altium Designer previously (and giving them Hell about minor issues, honestly), but the company decided to standardize on Mentor Graphics for PCB design.

I have to say, compared to Altium, using the Mentor Graphics “PADSFlow” (or ‘PADSFlaw‘ as I like to call their abysmal constellation of half-assed software) is like trying to teach a pig to whistle.  The Mentor Graphics product really SUCKS and they know it well (because that is self-evident & I’ve told them so in detail).  I want to share my opinions about it with you (whoever “you” are).  Jesus H. Christ, I get a better user experience with CadSoft EAGLE, the pencil and quadrille paper I was designing with 30 years ago, or even the 80’s version of  “HiWire”  (the very first CAD I ever used).  I could deal with a Windows 3.1 level of user interface, even a DOS 5.0 user interface,  but with DX Designer I feel like my productivity would be better if I was actually PISSING my designs into a snowbank.

The DX Designer user interface is either un-evolved or just plain insulting for starters. Half of the time when I click on the “Help” button it will crash the application, and the times that it doesn’t  the information you need is just not there.  Don’t EVEN bother with the vestigial context-sensitive help icon, it will just open a browser window that tells you to look somewhere else for information.  (This “feature” alone puts Mentor Graphics at the top of my list of nominees for “Death by Mass Rabid Weasel Attack”).  It’s reminiscent of the scene in “Office Space” where they guys are trying to figure out how to launder money by looking up the definition in the dictionary; they found words but not answers.

If you are trying to manipulate a component on a sheet of your schematic but need to rotate it, you’ll need to open a pop-up menu for that component by clicking on one of the pixel-width lines within the component to open the window.  This will likely take you several tries (and that’s after you manage to zoom in on the component, more on that later).  If you are lucky enough to get that darned menu open, then you get to select the “Transform” option, then the “Rotate CCW” option, which will rotate it 90 degrees.  Boy, that sure makes more sense than having a hot-key and a smart selection routine that will grab the component when you click inside its boundary and then rotate it 90 degrees, doesn’t it?  (Please say ‘no’, so the righteous chain-whipping can begin in earnest).

Oh, you’d actually like to connect some components with lines (AKA ‘nets’)?  Here’s another really kludgey part of DX Designer: component pins had better be three grid increments apart or you are going to see your nets do some pretty weird snake-dances on the way (and then they will probably still evaporate like Karl Rove’s wet-dream of a permanent Republican majority after your terminating mouse-click).  Every pin seems to have this mysterious 3-grid “line of death or disfigurement” around it.  Kiss-off your hopes of making a fairly compact-yet-clear schematic in DX Designer or get ready to do the Snake Dance!  (This alone merits the “The Angry Mobs Decapitated Me” dis-merit badge for whoever made this the Mentor Graphics cannon).

Of course, to make a connection you have to be able to see a pin or endpoint clearly, and if, like me, you are working on some middlin’ complex stuff you’ll be needing to zoom in and zoom out at specific points of interest.  Well, DX Designer makes this a “Thing of the Future” by defining “zoom” to mean “zoom to center of sheet”.  Positioning your mouse and using the scroll button gets you a well tempered finger (from Mentor Graphics) rather than a clear view of the circuit element you want to see!  You are going to have to zoom in a little, then fiddle with the scroll bars at the right & bottom of the window, DC al coda.

Say you are working on a banked memory subsystem, with, say 16 each address and data lines (global signals) going to say 8 identical memory devices.  Can you do it one time, then paste copies of all the nets and labels on each memory device?  Not well or easily, unless you copy them off a different page because the idiot DxD product deletes the “global” attribute when you do this within the same page.  Lets count it up: 8 devices times 32 connection, times 4 mouse-clicks to access the local/global ticky-box = carpal tunnel syndrome, high blood-pressure, eye-strain and justifiable homicide.

As Ed Hurlihy would put it: “Time is on the competition’s side when you use DX Designer by Mentor Graphics!”.

Don’t even get me started about the friggin’ “pin files”, the bizarre “HETERO” settings or having to open symbols in MS Word to manually correct bogus default settings and such, the whole “get used to clicking on every signal on your schematic at least 10 times” or the “well, the ’save + check’ function just barfed a lot of errors, but the error messages in the little  window aren’t linked in any way to the general region of the ‘note’, ‘warning’ or ‘error’ (so if DX is whining about something related to an oftentimes irrational default / invisible attribute conflict you don’t have a prayer of making use of the worthless Mentor Graphics product to find it).

Mentor Graphics is just a waste of time, spontaneously trashing designs.

Hint:  if DX Designer decides to screw up what you are doing…. just delete all the connections, labels and properties you can, then start over again (and again and again…) — it will take less time than finding the source of the problem {eg, your initial purchase decision} and correcting it.

DX Designer is the least capable and most infuriating schematic capture system I’ve used since 1982, bar none.  If you see it coming at you, SHOOT TO KILL or it will steal all your ‘essence’, defile your women, stampede your cattle and give you the Clap.  Yes, DX Designer is that unclean.

At several thousand bucks per seat and in light of the ‘issues’ built into the product (and I can only conclude it was with malice aforethought), if you don’t end up wanting to sue these bastards for gross negligence and misrepresentation, you deserve every bit of malfunction you’ve paid for (Duwane, I hope you are reading this!).

Mentor Graphics should be debarred from selling inside the USA just on the basis of the lack of a usable help system (it sucks so bad only to encourage you to buy their “training seminars” is my guess), the finicky non-response to selecting a net, bus or component, the poorly documented features (like refusing to recognize lower case pin numbers), the really cool way their software crashes leaving your design in ruins and their contemptuous license system (you want to be able to actually look at your CAM output… well, that’s an additional charge, you understand!  Sure, Pads can place/orient parts on a radial grid… but only one at a time, unless you give us even more money… and the blood of virgins, MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!).

Mentor Graphics as a whole, and DX Designer in specific, is either an EPIC FAIL or an EPIC ABUSE (or a continuing criminal enterprise), I can’t decide which.   It is hard to imagine this level of incompetent applications programming (after all these years), the product’s user unfriendliness and unwieldiness and the level of corporate “up yours, Bud” attitude that this product radiates as being anything except an embodiment of everything that’s going wrong in America right now.  Bring in the guillotines!

Does Mentor hire anyone that’s NOT a psychopath bent on destruction? Companies that put out this kind of excrement need to be shut down and their executives and managers blacklisted.  This gang has turned a once pretty okay product into crap, and nobody should pay them to do that again: they should be sentenced to screwing up orders in a fast food restaurant where the angry customers can call them personally to task for their sins, forever and ever amen!

If Mentor Graphics was located in my city, their executives and managers might suffer a much higher than normal rate of unfortunate “accidents” involving falling masonry, flammable substances or large object forcibly inserted into their rectums (as a warning to all who dare follow the ‘Mentor Graphics path to the Dark Side’).  These kind of sub-humans need to have their birth certificates savagely revoked: they steal from all Humanity, even while knowing better.  At this moment Mentor Graphics pisses me off even more than what’s left of the GOP KoolAid mixer/drinkers, the Birthers, the Birchers, the Klan and all those other of wastes of protein:  fuck’em all unto death, I say!

Don’t waste your money or time using Mentor Graphics products, gang!  Save yourself a lot of aggravation by sticking to almost any other product on the market:  it will be just as capable (if not more so) and lots less buggy… or wait for the wintertime, drink a lot of coffee and get your aim honed for action.   You’ll be glad you did.

Some free advertising copy for Mentor Graphics and their DX Designer ( I hearby formally and legally renounce to all parties and for all time the use of the following text by anyone including Mentor Graphics (may their nipples crumble into crusty bits in very public places and to their great displeasure, just because they deserve it for vending such UTTER CRAP as USABLE PRODUCT,  PraiseBob!):

• Mentor Graphics: more SUCK for the buck!
• I just love not being able to zoom to a selected location by default, that’s why I use DxD!
• DxD: Couldn’t we have beaten the ‘outsourced’ people harder to get a useful product?
  
• DxD: where even clicking on ‘Help’ can crash your system
• Dude, it’s totally ‘rad’ and ‘totally random’:  DxDesigner!
• You’ve got time to guess for a living: DxDesigner!
• Tear up your work and do it over again because you use Dx Designer!
  
• DxDesigner, from Mentor Graphics… because the other packages enhance productivity!
• You don’t hate life enough?  Try DxDesigner by Mentor Graphics, it’s ‘Craptastic^©‘!
• Death by a thousand mouse-clicks: Dx Designer?
• When I deleted this component all the buses and signals disappeared, too!  Dx Designer will blow you away!

Personal issues , 100+F degree weather, an SBIR proposal and an article for “Steampunk Magazine“ (as well as my investigation into low-tech hydroponics)  have had me offline for a bit… (it’s an ADD thing, hope you understand).

I’m re-tooling a different low-tech wind energy approach now, and working on a small-scale “smart grid” application, but expect something on methane digesters ‘real soon now’ (with typical low-tech, ‘tinkerer-sans-garage’ appeal).

As ever,
Offlogic
26 July 2009

I finally got to play with PurEtch, a photopolymer etch resist film sold by Cape Fear Press.

It’s easy to use and uses no toxic chemicals: laminate it to your copper/other metal plate under “bug light” (the process is similar to applying sun-shade film to a window), dry it with a hair-drier, attach your transparency artwork, expose to sunlight (about 12-16 seconds at noon), then wash out the shadowed part with soda ash/washing soda solution and etch (see Cape Fear Press site for videos).

Instead of electro-etch, I use H2O2/muriatic acid at 2:1.

First impressions:

1. I’m still not up to the repeatability I’ve achieved with toner-transfer.
2. I think I’ll like this stuff once I get the hang of it.

The two recurrent problems I have (besides working hurriedly to keep cats/dog/family from flipping the lights on in the kitchen) are heating the plates/resist long enough to get the water out (I ruined first plate by over-heating), and leaving it to develop fully (I keep pulling it out early, then battling a transparent residual mask).

I’m sure this will get better as I gain familiarity/confidence with the new resist.

This is my favorite cartoon (like EVER) by Bernard Kliban [my early working years were haunted by this image, really].

From Wikipoedia:

“In 1962, Kliban became a Playboy cartoonist, contributing cartoons until his death. He is best-known for the book Cat, a collection of cartoons about cats drawn in Kliban’s distinctive style. The cat cartoons were discovered by a Playboy editor and the 1975 book Cat was born. This led to several other books of cartoons ending with Advanced Cartooning in 1993. Since Cat, his cartoons have adorned many products including stickers, calendars, mugs, and t-shirts.

The books that followed Cat consisted mostly of extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness. Many of these are cartoons that Kliban drew for Playboy. They often contained dysmorphic drawings of nude figures in extremely unlikely environments, as if to spoof Playboy’s own subject matter. Kliban also had a recurring series of drawings called “Sheer Poetry”, in which the page would be split into six panels, containing random images of objects whose names, when spoken in the order presented, would form a rhyming, nonsensical verse.

According to Art Spiegelman, Kliban invented the form of cartoon, popularized by Gary Larson and others, of a single panel with a third-person caption describing the action”.

To William Burroughs, wishing that he was still alive.

Thanksgiving is good, not all dark, but in memoriam of a lot of good things, gone like water under the bridge:

Thanks for you, Bill.
You are missed.

Odds & Ends
Odds and ends make up the majority of my bills ‘o’ materials, with most materials very cheap if not free.

Yes, certain “consumables” do require expenditures at the drug store or beauty supply (hydrogen peroxide, acetone), hardware store (muriatic/dilute hydrochloric acid) or (in the case of copper-clad PCBs, semiconductors and more “interesting” chemicals) even ordered in from the internet.

Still you can have a lot of fun by just becoming a “rational pack-rat”.

Maybe it’s the thrifty Scots-Irish genes on my mother’s side, but face it: junk is fun and very useful!
Recycling is very chic these days.  Remember: it’s only garbage is you don’t make use of it.

I’m not talking about old car parts type junk (though I wish I had space for more of that), I’m talking the more mundane items of everyday life that are free for the storage space.

Containers
I am a container freak, I admit this freely:  pill bottles, film cans, margarine tubs, the little plastic cases that doodads come in. There is nothing so useful as an appropriately reusable/disposable container. (Did you know that PET plastic pop bottles will turn into little gloopy boogers when sulfuric acid hits them? Know your plastics!).

Dead Appliances and Electronics

Wall Warts
I never throw away a wall wart, EVER!!! I’ve got a drawer of them, most with the plugs still attached. There are so many plating, etching and hydrolysis experiments that require you to pinch off just a little bit of the power on the Grid that I’m sure most of us would go to Hell for wasting such a resource.

Dead Circuit Boards
Always have a few sacrificial circuit boards (from a dead UPS, say, or last year’s VCR/DVD) around to play with.

Organ Donors
When your weed-whacker dies, keep the motor, switch, power cord.
Become a recycling Ressurectionist, a ‘Knox-doctor of Appliances’, a ‘Parasite of the Disposable Culture’.

My favorites are cheap inkjet printers. They usually cost less than a set of replacement cartridges, and every one of them has a power supply (usually external/wall wart), a stepper motor, a “regular” DC motor and at least one photointerrupter-type paper edge sensor.

A real “Cannibal Commando” can come up with at least a dozen ways to use parts like this to start his new Warlord Kingdom: “Every Person a Monarch, Every Home an Embassy”.

On Amateur Science

If you want to explore bad enough, you will. If you are lucky, you will find the tools &  supplies you need (beakers and stuff show up at brewing supply shops, I find) and hopefully, someone more experienced to influence your efforts in positive (not getting ARRESTED)  direction.  Mayhaps you’ll found the next Bose or Intel?

These  are the best of times and the worst of times. Drop me a line if you can find a chemistry set with anything stronger than dilute ammonium hydroxide solution in it. Then go to the grocery store and buy a pound of “household lye”: the world seems immune to irony, no?

I read the other day that prescribed drugs caused something like three times as many ODs as illicit narcotics… but don’t let me get on any soapboxes. I just LOVE Big Brother all over the place, in every mathematically conceivably way and every chance I get.