Best Picture of the Year

I don't get to (or choose to) watch every movie that comes out every year. But I just saw a film that is easily the best one I've seen this year: Winter's Bone. Bleak and beautiful, it tells a story of a seventeen-year-old with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her plight and how she handles it are captivating, and the cast of unknowns is perfect in this setting. Highly recommended.

Innovative mobile keyboard design

Here's a demo of a remarkable new way to input data into a mobile device.

Best New Flavor of the Year

"Anything Goes" sauce, from Fresh Market. Think of it as ketchup with pepper, but it's more complicated than that. It has a very nice black pepper flavor but without the heat you might expect from that much pepper flavor. The tomato sauce is thinner than good ole American ketchup, but that doesn't detract from the total product. This morning I added it to an omelet with a little sour cream for a nice effect.

This is good stuff!

Axiom 43

Never try to buy a glass of good wine in a sports bar.

An excellent Chicago jazz pianist

My cousin Harold just made me aware of a stunning jazz talent from Las Vegas named Mike Jones. He recently recorded a gig in Chicago at the Green Mill, and he put it online for free download. Strongly recommended, after only listening to "There is no Greater Love," which is influenced by Oscar Peterson. His bio lists Art Tatum and James P. Johnson as other influences. A musician to watch, and to seek out when you're in Vegas.

A peaceful moment with Thich Nhat Hanh

This is a good way to achieve a bit of peace.

Wall climbing technology

SRI looks like a pretty interesting place.

More on the Fostex 260 4-track recording studio

A few blogs ago, I talked about repairing my Fostex 260 recording "studio." One thing leads to another, and after I had performed the power supply fixes mentioned previously, I discovered that the drive belt had turned into asphalt. A few comments about repairing that mess:

First, cleaning up the residue from the drive belt was quite a problem. It had become goo, no more, no less. There was a blob of goo around the driving spool and another around the driven wheel. It turns out that mineral spirits, carefully applied, can remove this mess, but some serious dismantling of the tape unit is required first. To wit:

Remove the bottom cover (seven long screws and two short machine screws near the vent).

Remove the top (another three long screws and a single high-pitch screw near the front) after removing the five fader handles and one pitch knob.

Remove the four screws holding the tape transport in place. It is not necessary to disconnect the various cables on the bottom side, because the cleanup can be done in place. But you will need to unroute several mini-coaxes and small ribbon cables from under a cable protector on the lower left side of the transport. When you've done that, you should be able to lift the transport out and flip it to the left (because of the cables). There is a cover over the belt which is removed by taking out two small Phillips machine screws on the right and left sides. Slide the the cover up and rock it out to remove it. At this point, the driven wheel can be slid out of the unit from the bottom (along its axle) and cleaned separately. Don't lose the small plastic washer that fits over the axle on the top side of the transport.

Cleaning the driving spool is a bit more difficult because the drive motor needs to be protected during the process. Nevertheless, the spool needs to be as clean as you can get it, because the belt fits very snugly between the flanges of the spool.

Here's the important part: drive belts are extremely hard to find. Don't even bother asking Fostex distributors or Radio Shack. But there is a store on eBay called The Stevelec Store (http://stores.ebay.com/The-Stevelec-Store) which stocks an assortment of flat drive belts. The one you want for the Fostex 260 is 10.5" by 0.2", listed as "Stereo VCR Cassette 8-Track Tape Deck FLAT Drive Belt". You'll have to give the dimensions in the notes to the seller.

Comments on subtle cultural evolution

I note the quiet passing of an era in Boca Raton, as the powers that be this year rescinded the long-standing rule against selling alcoholic beverages on Sunday mornings. I didn't care one way or another about that particular law, but losing it takes away a tiny bit of what one might call Old Boca -- the quaint, older-fashioned town that Boca Raton used to be a generation ago (before liposuction and cosmetic surgery became requirements for citizenship).

SMWITOH (story my wife is tired of hearing):

My favorite Blue Law story involves Jackson, Mississippi, where I lived in the mid 1970s. At that time, if you woke up on a Sunday morning with a thirst for orange juice, you could find an open convenience store to buy a bottle of orange juice. But in the same store, you couldn't buy frozen orange juice. Why? Because making it into liquid orange juice would require you to do work on Sunday. The laws were that finely reasoned back then.

Stunning information about stem cells

Click on Download or Listen Now. Some fascinating speculation about the relationship between aging and loss of stem cells, and an idea about cancer being stem cell generation gone wild. I hope I'm around long enough to watch practical applications of this research.

This is how you make naan (Indian bread)

Talented chef! Click here.

Who is Jorn Barger?

This blog will mostly follow the model set by the inventor of the blog, Jorn Barger. Jorn created robotwisdom.com but no longer updates it. Somehow it's still out there, though.

Barger's model was to surf the web, collect interesting links, and list them on a web site. That's mostly what I plan to do.

Last I heard, Jorn was panhandling in San Francisco, with a sign that said "Invented the Blog". Sad. I hope he's OK.

Fixing a dead Fostex 260 Multitracker 4-track recording studio

The paucity of google hits on the Fostex 260 tells me that there are not a lot of 'em out there any more. After all, it's an analog tape device. Nevertheless, I recently was able to repair mine; and hoping that this blog will be scanned by Google, I decided to record brief notes on how I did it, for any other folks out there with the same problem.

The problem was that the tape transport wasn't working. Everything else was OK -- pots, amps, mixer, etc. I opened it up and discovered a blown 2A 250V fuse. I replaced it, and that one immediately blew, too. Looking around the innards, I noticed that there was a bodacious electrolytic capacitor in the power supply section. It's a 10,000mfd 25VDC low-profile capacitor. On checking the board tracings, it was clear that the cap was early in the circuit protected by the fuse. That became my Object of Interest, and sure enough, it turned out to be the faulty component.

My local Radio Shack didn't have 10,000mfd caps, so I bought two 4700mfd axial caps, connected them in parallel, and wired them into the circuit. It got a little bit complicated because there's not enough room inside for the two caps bundled together. I just cut a hole into the case and ran leads outside to accommodate the cap. So, it's ugly. So what? It works.