Refurbishing the aquarium stand for my new used 48 gallon tank.

A good friend of mine is giving me his fish tank(s). Unfortunatly, it’s through a bit of misfortune of his, needing to cell his townhouse.

The tanks have been well used, and so will need a bit of ‘freshening up’.

Tank stand on the back of the trucklet I brought the stand home on my luggage rack.

Tank in the back seat of the trucklet Here is the tank in my truck. I still have to lug the thing out and into my apartment. Maybe during lunch tomorrow…

Tank stand ready to paint Here is the tank stand after I have knocked most of the rust off of it with a wire brush in my drill. I have set up the plastic so I can paint in the house. It’s too windy, humid and dark outside to paint.

Tank stand being painted Here you can see the stand getting painted up so it looks good.

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Home Made Chicken & Dumpling Soup from dehydrated veggies and such

A few weeks ago, I dehydrated some veggies, and made a jar of mixxed veggies. Let me tell you, I have been eating more veggies in the last couple of weeks then I have the last year! These dried veggies go into everything that involves boiling water.

I have also been on a dumpling craze as of late. Tonight’s dumplings where caraway-seseme-cumin dumplings. Actually pretty good.

Everything was off the pantry shelf tonight except for the chicken base, of which I added a bit too much of.

The meat was some retort-pouch turkey I got on sale when back in Florida. It expires near the end of the year, and I have a few pouches of it, so I am trying to eat some of it up before it expires.

I think I will let the photos do the rest of the talking…
food storage dehydrated vegitable chicken dumpling soup 
food storage dehydrated vegitable chicken dumpling soup 
food storage dehydrated vegitable chicken dumpling soup 
food storage dehydrated vegitable chicken dumpling soup 

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PHP Meetup & Digital Camera Hacking Part 2

WAAAAaaaay back in Janurary, I started this project. Tonight, I finally finished it – well, I got one of the several cameras hacked.

Just a reminder, one of the guys at my PHP Meetup handed me a few Walgreens Digital Cameras, and some parts and said he can’t solder well enough to give it a try.

Well, it has been sitting on my table for the last 2 months because I couldn’t find my desoldering tools. While blogging about it last time, I remembered where they where. In my RC car stuff, and not in my electronics hutch where they should be. So tonight I dug it out.

  Well, tonight I desoldered the card on the camera. I thought I had broke it when the card came off with a click. I only lifted a single trace, which is pretty good for not having done surgery on electronics in years. I had to tweak all the pins on the memory card socket, as they didn’t quite reach right. I also had to do a ‘stupid’ soldering job for 2 of the pins, as they simply didn’t line up with where they needed to go at all.


 Here is the very first photo I took with the camera. I was trying to see if the memory card I first grabbed was good. It appears it wasn’t. I tried the 2nd card in the computer first. The computer could read it. The camera could too! Here is my poor, neglected fish tank in the computer room. The camera takes 1280×1024 pixel images. The date is WAY off on the camera, back in 2001, with no way to change it on the camera that I see.


 This is the second photo I took. This is a photo of my computer with the card reader with the bad card in the slot.


  This is a pretty cool project, it is self-documenting. Here are the spare parts from this project. 1 Daughter card, 1 card bay cover which can’t be used because it’s not hinged, a couple of peices of tape that probably helped seal up the imager, and 2 screws that held the daughter card in.
I had a terrible time with trying to get the power switch to work with the cameara back together, so I had to ‘adjust’ that area by filing the slot the switch-slide operated in. It now turns on and off fine with that extra play in the switch.

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