A Leslie Wong Blog

When I bought my first SureFire 6P flashlight, I found that the Malkoff M60 was one of the best P60 LED drop-ins.

I like the beam profile produced by the optic in the Malkoff M60, a hot spot with useful spill. The disadvantage of the Malkoff M60 – for me – is its single mode. I do not need 100% brightness all the time – lower levels of light are sometimes more useful.

One of my favorite flashlight mods is using the DealExtreme 16-Mode 3W 3.7V 7135 Circuit Board for Cree and SSC Emitters (SKU 7612). I like this circuit board because one of the groups has only low-mid-high, with no strobe. I’ve modded my Lumapower D-Mini, an Ultrafire C2 and a few P60 drop-ins with this board.

The modes are in three groups:

1. Low (10%) – Mid (35%) – High (100%) – Strobe – SOS
2. Low (10%) – Mid (35%) – High (100%)
3. Low (10%) – Mid (35%) – High (100%) – Special Police Type Strobe – Slow Strobe (3Hz) – Super Slow Strobe (1Hz) – SOS

I recently bought a Surefire 6P flashlight body that was bored to accept a larger diameter 18650 battery. I thought the DX 7612 would be a good mod for a Malkoff M60. The main problem was getting up the nerve to try to mod the Malkoff M60 because of the possibly destroying a $55 drop-in, but I decided to try it.

The sealing material used around the circuit board and LED in the M60 is called potting. The rear of the drop-in is sealed with this material. I thought it would be a hard material but I found the it was actually soft and rubbery. I used a jeweler’s screwdriver as a chisel to start removing it. As I got close to the circuit board, I used a little lacquer thinner to soften the black sealing material. When I removed all the potting from the top of the board, I used some more lacquer thinner to soften the material in the gaps in the side. After removing the solder, I was able to pry up the circuit board and remove it.

The diameter of the DX 7612 board is about 17mm. The Malkoff had about 16.5mm diameter space for the board, so I used a Dremel sanding band to reduce the diameter of the 7612.

As I disassembled the Malkoff, the robust design was easy to see. When I desoldered the Malkoff circuit board from the housing, I could tell from the way it retained the heat (because of its mass), how well it would work as a heat sink inside the flashlight body.

With the DX 7612 on high and an 18650 battery, the modded Malkoff output looks pretty much the same as the stock Malkoff M60 on high with two RCR123s. I haven’t taken any measurements, but the specs for the 7612 says it puts out 1000ma @ 3.7v, and since I didn’t move the LED or the optic, it seems like my modded Malkoff M60 is just like the stock one but with different levels.

I installed the Windows 7 Beta (7000) on my Via pc2500, powered by a 1.5 GHz Via C7-D, an x86-compatible desktop processor. The Via motherboard is installed in a SilverStone SST-LC11S-300 HTPC case connected to a Sony KV-36FV1 television.

I wanted to use the Via pc2500 as a DVD player and Netflix streaming player but the performance of Windows 7 Beta on the Via pc2500 isn’t really that great, even with a PCI video card (a EVGA 256-P1-N399-LX GeForce 6200 256MB 64-bit GDDR2). With 2GB of system RAM and the latest version of Silverlight, Netflix streaming is jerky. DVDs played with Windows Media Player also do not play smoothly.

The Windows Experience Index was only 1.3, and the blame was on the Via 1.5 GHz processor. Task Manager showed 100% CPU usage while trying to stream Netflix. (My ATT-Yahoo DSL connection (Elite 6.0/768) speed is about 5.2 mb/s down and 437 kb/s up, so Netflix streaming looks OK on my more robust PCs.) I don’t really see how the new netbooks can have any decent performance with Windows 7.

The pc2500 is currently my hardware looking for an applicaton. Now I’ve tried Windows XP, gOS, Ubuntu, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Linux MCE. The Via hardware is just anemic. Maybe with a Mimo USB monitor, it’d be OK as a carputer.

Windows 7 Beta on my vintage (purchased 2002) Shuttle SB51G works OK. The Shuttle XPC has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU (SL6HL), 1 GB RAM and an ATI All-In-Wonder 9600. I normally boot Windows XP 2005 MCE and use it as a file server, media server (using TVersity), DVD player and Netflix streaming client (through a browser).

Windows 7 performance feels comparable to XP MCE, that is to say, it doesn’t feel slow. But there also isn’t any other crap installed – anti-virus and other applications. The Windows Experience Index was 3.0, and in this case, the sluggard was the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Ultra ATA/100 320 GB hard drive.

Since there are no Windows 7 video drivers for the lowly ATI Radeon 9600 / X1050, I used the ATI Catalyst 9.1 Display Driver for Windows Vista. I wanted to use ATI Catalyst Control Center application to hotkey switch between the primary and secondary display (Dell 2007 WFP and a Sony KV-36FV1), so I can watch DVDs on the Sony TV in the living room. The hotkey switch that works in XP doesn’t work with Windows 7.

My favorite flashlight is my JETBeam JET-I PRO I.B.S. As I wrote in this post, “The push button tail cap switch is a “reverse” click type, i.e., the switch will make or break contact after it clicks. I prefer the “tactical” or forward click switch – a forward click switch will allow a half press of the switch to turn on a flashlight.”

I wasn’t able to find a forward click switch until I saw that BatteryJunction.com had a Forward Tactical Click Upgrade Switch For LumaPower M1-XRE, LM31, LM33, LM301, LM303 on sale for $7.50 USD.

The contact spring on the LumaPower switch was a little too long, so I soldered on a shorter one. The switch’s circuit board was a snug press fit over the threads in the JETBeam tail cap. Switching modes now only requires a half press.

Besides being a major sporting event, I look at the Superbowl as a yearly opportunity to pull out the DeLonghi deep fryer and fry everything in sight. The day before, I go the supermarket and buy everything that is fryable.

A couple of days ago, the NY Times, published an article on the Bacon Explosion and for the first time in 19 years, I decided to give the DeLonghi a rest. But The Times seems more concerned with the blogging phenomena, I’m more concerned with pork, so I went to BBQ Addicts for the recipe. The simplicity of the Bacon Explosion pushed me over the edge. Four ingredients and four pounds of pork. How can you go wrong?

The ingredients:

2 pounds thick cut bacon
2 pounds Italian sausage
1 jar of your favorite barbeque sauce
1 jar of your favorite barbeque rub

The most difficult part is the bacon weave and keeping yourself from eating the pound of cooked bacon you’re supposed to put inside the roll.