A Leslie Wong Blog

As I continue on the path of acquiring things I wanted 40 years ago, I bought this Star Trek Original Series Communicator.

It “Features The Phrases: ‘Enterprise, this is Kirk,’ ‘Spock here Captain,’ ‘Aye Captain, Scott out,’ ‘Bridge here, Captain‘” and many more.

The moire effect works and there are 3 flashing LEDs. Pushing the button under the red LED activates the hailing function – it beeps after the door is closed. When the door is opened, Spock’s voice says, “Captain, shall I beam down an armed party?” No.

$35.95 (USD) at Amazon.com

I applied Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to my dual-boot Macbook. I use rEFit instead of Boot Camp, with OS X as the default OS, so after each restart, I had to manually select the Vista partition.

After a couple of restarts, Vista started up OK and I ran the Windows Experience Index tool and got this. (I manually stuck the old Apple logo in there; Apple is not a Windows OEM Vendor)

The clutch release bearing on our BMW Bavaria started grinding about a month ago, so it was time to take the transmission out and replace the bearing.

I bought the bearing a while ago, before I started taking everything apart. I held off getting a new disk and pressure plate so I could check the thickness of the friction material on the clutch disk. It was 8.5mm, while the minimum thickness (for the outboard release lever) is 7.8mm. I ordered a new clutch disk (21 21 1 223 125) anyway and pressure plate (21 21 1 202 052).

The 2008 Petronas Malaysian Grand Prix at the Sepang Circuit in Kuala Lampur is on March 23, 2008.

I got this piture from PicApp, which I read about on Om Malik’s blog.

PicApp is offering copyrighted images from Getty and Corbis (for web use only) with an imbedded ad. I’m not too hot on all the bobbin’ and weavin’.

We bought a Samson C01U, a large condensor, USB connected, microphone for direct recording to a computer.

The microphone includes a USB cable and a 2.75″ (69.85 mm) table top tripod stand. I recommend a heavy desktop base like this On Stage DS7200B Adjustable Desk Microphone Stand and the Samson SP01 Shockmount, which cuts down on vibration when that truck drives by, but makes it look really professional.

It’s pretty much plug and play with Windows or Macs, but Sansom has a “software preamp,” SoftPre applet, that has an input level meter, volume control, high-pass filter and phase switch.

Skype will never sound any better.

5:44 PM PDT

Volvo has the reputaion for being on the forefront of safety. I saw this piture in a forbesautos.com article on, The top 10 safety features for the future.” It shows Volvo’s collision mitigation technology that uses radar to anticipate a potential crash. I thought is was a laser system for destroying the car in front of you.

adrrain67 over at digg.com writes, “LEDs are fantastic. But for a long time, they’ve been fantastic more because of what we think they can do than what they actually do. We’ve been pretty sure that LEDs can produce warm, white light at efficiencies far beyond even the much-touted compact fluorescent bulbs. But we’ve yet to actually see that.”

I bought this RLM type industrial reflector to put in our carport, with the intention of lighting it with LEDs. The first iteration involve a string of white LED Christmas lights mounted through holes drilled in a board. Then I thought about a 110 VAC LED lamp, but most are down firing and wouldn’t use the reflector. Now I am looking at an LED driver puck like this, and a Cree LED mounted on a heatsink.

read more | digg story

Now that I’m a flashaholic, I’m always looking for brighter LEDs. A recent eBay search for the latest Cree XR-E 7090 white LED R2 bin, I found this Solarforce Cree R2 (5 mode) drop-in.

It’s called a P60 sized drop-in, because that is a Surefire size designation for a reflector-LED-regulator assembly that also fits many different other manufacturers flashlights. The Solarforce drop-in is advertised as 290 lumens (seems unlikely), maximum. The five modes are: strobe, 3 levels of brightness and S.O.S. It was $27.99 USD plus $3.00 shipping. It showed up today in the mail and I was shocked, because delivery from China, where the vendor is located, took only 10 days.

For a comparison test, I used fully charged Ultrafire RCR123 batteries and Ultrafire 502B flashlights with switches replaced with Judco SPST 519PB-ND I bought from Digi-Key. The other P60 size drop-in was a generic Cree P4 module. In the first beamshot, the difference is brightness is minor. I tried another Cree P4 and it put out much less light compared to the Solarforce R2 drop-in. The third beam shot uses the first two modules, but is underexposed 1.5 stops to maximize the visual difference in the two beams.

So did I find a brighter light? I have the feeling I did. I’ll have to check it with my light meter and compare the EVs.

My beamshots were done with a Nikon D70, Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens. Exposure information: ISO 400, 1/30 sec, f2.0.