I don’t agree with the way Rogers or Bell run their businesses, and I especially do not want to give them more money to further entrench their duopoly.  Having said that, I had to come up with a solution for TV at home.  Examining my options, I figured that I could install a proper TV antenna for ~$300. If you are on Bell or Rogers, guaranteed this will amortize in less than a year, and even less if you don’t require a digital TV tuner.

I wanted to avoid a rotor for many reasons.  My first concern was having the control box around, taking up space.  In addition, the control boxes are typically wired.  More wires for me to run, and also, it tethers you to were you can control the TV reception from.  Also, I’ll probably want to connect more than one TV to the system, so why should one TV be subject to the reception of the “main TV”?  Later, I would find out that a rotor would be incompatible with my attic due to space constraints – so it worked out!

I planned to install the antenna inside my attic.  With UHF, the higher you are, the better your signal.  You could put up a tower and probably double your signal, but a tower can run you ~$700+ installed, and leaves an unsightly skyline.  There are no other towers up in my neighbourhood.

I ran a conduit up from my basement to the inside of the soffit on the outside of my house, so that I would have a clean solution for running cables up to the attic.  I’m planning on also running CAT6 up to the bedrooms upstairs, so this little bit of extra work now, gives me a lot of flexibility for future runs.  This added ~$150 to the cost, once you include the extra tools I needed to do that job.

After doing some research, I figured that my best bet was to use an 8-Bay antenna, since Toronto is about 54km away, Buffalo is almost 100km away for the closest stations, plus the additional dB loss from installing inside the attic.  I was looking for deep fringe reception.  I decided to install a Channel Master CM-4228HD 8-Bay UHF Antenna.  Word on the street is that it isn’t as powerful as its older brother, the CM-4228, but I figured it would do.   I’ve heard that the wider beam width of a 4-Bay seems to serve people in the area well too, but you’ll reduce the strength of the reception (if you mount it on a tower, it will likely offset that loss). I also used a Channel Master CM-7777 Preamp to help boost the signal.

I used the venerable TVFool.com website to look up the position of the stations that I could receive, so I’d have an idea of what way to point my antenna.  In the end, I’ve pretty well just pointed it south, as it seems to pick up the CN Tower stations well enough, and now I’m getting stations from 144km away.

I used Sensuz Media to order my parts, they seem to have the best prices locally, and offer pickup in Markham.  Since I’m in Markham frequently, it was a snap for me to pick up.  I bought my mast for mounting over at Durham Radio, they were closer (for driving around with a 10′ post hanging out the back), and I wanted to see what they were all about.  They were quite friendly, and very helpful, so if you don’t want to go to Sensuz, Durham Radio is a great supplier, and can provide you with more region-specific information.

I was sure to use quad-sheilded RG6 for the long run from my attic to the inside of my house.  You want to limit the loss on this run as much as possible, since this is an unamplified signal.  I got a good deal over at Monoprice.  At the time, they didn’t have stock on bulk quad sheilded cable, so I bought 2×100′ lengths, plus some other odd sizes, premanufactured, and then trimmed to length after running.

Rogers has been up to some sneaky tricks on home builds.

All of the cable runs inside my house are split on the outside of my house, inside the “cable box”.  God forbid, I do “illegal splits” on my own signal.  Also, when I run future splits, I will have to run them in the basement anyways, it’s the only way that makes sense.  So now I’ve got two places to worry about splits: in my basement, and outside.  Also, the connectors outside are more prone to corrosion.  A very inconvenient setup for someone who has no intention of using cable again, just to protect Rogers’ business interests.  What ever happened to running one cable in from outside? I digress.

I thought I would need a special tool to get into the box, but I didn’t.  Needle-nose pliers were able to grasp onto the round bolt, and I was able to get in just fine, and disconnect Rogers, and connect my equipment.  It seems as though the rest of the house is wired with RG59, but that’s okay – I’m amplified at this point so we’ve got more breathing room.

Long story short, over the air tv is a viable alternative in Oshawa to cable/satellite for me.  I hope to get more people set up on this over time.

I’m going to have to give it a try.  I usually take a bite, and then twist the small bone off, and then eat the rest.

If you go to the chipset manufacturer’s support page for the Sii3124 chip, you can download a set of BIOSes that will allow you to switch the controller out of RAID mode, and into “IDE mode” (possibly AHCI mode, I haven’t been able to actually test what happens then).

To do this though, ideally I’d like a FreeDOS boot image, because let’s face it – floppies are dead.  I still have a bunch, but why?

I followed the “Using Makebootfat on Linux” directions at: http://wiki.fdos.org/Installation/BootDiskCreateUSB, but I found them a little onerous, especially if I need to redo this every time I want to create a custom image.  Also, after following the directions, the system would not boot, because the geometry of the drive didn’t match, or something obscure like that.  I was greeted with the error: “Bad or missing Command.com Interpreter”.  I went into Gparted (0.4.3), and enabled the LBA flag on the partition, and then everything booted up fine (drive geometry is also dead).

You can follow these instructions yourself, or if you prefer something easier, here is an image that you can write directly to the USB drive using dd.   I’m not sure what the Windows analog to dd is, perhaps something in cygwin will do:

FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img.bz2

This is a 31MB image, that is mostly free space, so that should give enough room to fit many different utilities, and also fit on a 32MB USB memory stick.

The image is released under GPLv2, the same as FreeDOS.  You can find the sources for all this stuff at the above link.

Now my card boots just fine without any logical drives defined.

I found the costs to be comparable to many of the low end logic analyzers on the market today, but the board itself has so much more potential, especially if you get the 1,200,000 gates version.  To get the logic analyzer to run, I simply needed to change the ucf file of the “Spartan 3E: Experimental Version for New Spartan 3E Starter Kit – Source (2007-03-08)” port. The RLE didn’t work for me, but it works great without it.

UCF for NEXYS2 and SUMP Logic Analyzer

I’ve played around with the board when I’ve had time, and it’s a lot of fun.  I started to do the tutorials on verilog.com – but I find I learn best hands on first, and then go back and look at specifics when I’ve got a good base.  When I came across these books, I was very excited and ordered them.  The neat thing is that the Basys book’s examples work perfectly on the Nexys2 board. They are geared to be very hands-on – which at this stage of the game is something that I think will work well for me.

I’ve already done a course that included most of the digital logic theory, so I didn’t have much of a learning curve when it came to those concepts, and once I started getting into the more complex circuits (starting at chapter 5), I was able to begin sinking my teeth in.

I downloaded Icarus, and GTKWave, and wrote my first test bench, to test the Verilog waters – and it went well.  I am looking forward to working through these books, and producing a FORTH computer by the end.

Full install detail

I’ve recently added a page describing my little update to my home wiring. If you are not getting the full sync rate out of your DSL modem, or are experiencing frequent disconnects, this procedure may help you…

How to Belle Your Phone Line for DSL

Eastern Garter Snake

So, doing my usual morning garden check-over, I found a new friend!

When I went to check in the evening he was gone, so I don’t know if it’s a permanent resident or not.

Toads and slugs both happen to be on this fellow’s diet, so I have mixed feelings about whether it will ultimately be good for the garden. I figure the more diversity the better though.

2009 Garden, First Planted

I’ve been working in the garden again. Yesterday I finished raking out the soil, so that I had a nice, even bed. I also decided to pile the rocks I pulled out in a little more functional and aesthetic way. Today I finally got to the good stuff…

So, as I mentioned earlier, our garden is 18′x18′.  With this amount of space, I planted 6 rows, 3′ each.  This gave lots of room for our peppers, and hopefully enough room for the tomatoes.

All told, I planted:

• 12 Jalapenos
• 6 Habaneros
• 4 Roma Tomatoes
• 2 Yellow Boy Tomatoes
• 1 Striped German Tomato
• 4 Romaine Lettuce
• 1 String Bean
• 1 Watermelon
• Complimentary herbs including: basil, oregano, garlic, marigolds

In addition to piling the rocks in the back (as you can kind of see in the picture), I also attempted to build a toad house.

Marigolds are reportedly good at repelling pests that affect peppers, and Tomatos, including whitefly – which we get a lot of around here.  However, they are also the favourite food of the slug, second perhaps to my habaneros.  I’ve lost a good chunk of my crop two years running to slugs, and I’m hoping that this year I’ll get a toad or two to clean them up.  We’ll see how that goes!

View from upstairs

Theremin board with two 260kHz oscillators

At the theremin workshop, I was able to add my two pitch oscillators, and tested them successfully at 260kHz. It took me one session for each oscillator (3 and 5), but I was done early on the second oscillator.

During session 6 last week, I added the tuning circuit for the oscillator that is attached to the control panel. (not in picture)