A Leslie Wong Blog

View Larger Map One night, while driving through the grove of Eucalyptus trees on US 101 near San Juan Bautista, California, I realized that the sealed beam headlamps on my Alfetta were inadequate. This is the same road that Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak) took to Mission San Juan Bautista in the film Vertigo. A modern car had pulled up next to me in the other lane and I suddenly saw the road ahead. That’s when I realized that I had to improve the lighting on... Read the rest of this entry »

A little over two months ago, an incompetent driver slammed into my parked Alfa Romeo. The Alfetta was in the body shop for 46 days while I argued with State Farm over the value of the car and searched for replacement parts. I was lucky to find some Euro-bumpers on AlfaBB.com. Larry Jr., at Alfa Parts Exchange was more than helpful in getting me grills and headlight buckets. I was up in Berkeley, so I made a personal appearance at Alfa Parts and bought a reproduction turn signal lens, complete with... Read the rest of this entry »

The fuel gauge on the Bavaria stopped working. I was hoping that it was only a bad ground connection on the instrument cluster. On my first repair attempt, I hit the top of the dash above the instrument cluster to jostle the connections and take out some frustration. When only the latter worked, I looked at my BMW repair CD. To test the fuel gauge, the repair manual said to connect the brown-yellow wire on the fuel level sender to ground and to switch on the ignition momentarily. The gauge deflected... Read the rest of this entry »

I downloaded LiveAndroid, a LiveCD for Android running on x86 platforms from Google Code, to try on my Macintrash. Currently I am running OS X 10.5.7 and Windows 7 (build 7100) on my Late 2006 Macbook (Core 2 Duo, T7200). I’m also using rEFIt as my boot manager. The Android LiveCD showed up as Tux on the boot screen and I got to the Android desktop with the message, “Please connect charger, the battery is getting low: less than 15% remaining”. I was running on AC and the battery... Read the rest of this entry »

In late 2007, I bought a couple of Ultrafire C2 flashlights. They were nicely made for an inexpensive flashlight and they used Cree XR-E LEDs (P4 bin). Last fall, I modded one of my C2s with a Seoul Semiconductors Z-Power LED P7. The P7 is a quad die LED. I made it direct drive running off a single Li-Ion 18650 battery. There were mods that could be made for a circuit board to drive the P7 but I was too lazy to make one. I recently found a 3-Mode Regulated Circuit Board for Cree MC-E and SSC P7... Read the rest of this entry »

The body shop called today to point out some rust they found when they removed the rear bumper (like I didn’t know about this). I guess what they really wanted to tell me was that it was going to cost more money. I had ladled POR-15 Rust Preventive Paint on the sheet metal above the left bumper shock six years ago when I saw it looking not so good. I tried to put out of my mind the rust that I could see inside the bumper where the rubber had split. Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’... Read the rest of this entry »

I was a little disappointed with my DealExtreme Cree MC-E P60 drop-in (SKU 21037). The specs say that on high, it should be pulling 2800ma and putting out 410 lumens. I measured 1.67A on high with a Li-Ion 18650 battery. But for $23.49 USD, I couldn’t complain too much. I saw that Shiningbeam.com has a 3-Mode Regulated Circuit Board for Cree MC-E and SSC P7 LEDs (SKU 1217). Their specs say the output current is 2500mA on high. I thought I’d try it as a replacement for the circuit board in... Read the rest of this entry »

After haggling with State Farm Insurance over the value of my car, they agreed to pay for the repairs caused by their insured, errant driver. Since the front end was being worked on, I decided to pay the body shop for some additional work, mainly replacing the Swiss-cheesed rocker panels behind the front wheel wells. Wolf Steel actually sells the lower front fender repair panels, but when I called them, they said it’d take at 3 weeks to get them. J & J Autobody in Monterey, where the... Read the rest of this entry »

One of the problems I am experiencing with WordPress today is an out of memory php error with WordPress 2.8 when I use Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin to rebuilt my sitemap: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 41 bytes) in /…/wp-settings.php on line 288 If I disable all my active plugins except Google XML Sitemaps, I don’t get the error when rebuilding the sitemap. I am using Godaddy shared hosting, have added the line “memory_limit... Read the rest of this entry »