The metal shaper man’s blog

I was just looking over some of my past posts and I seem to be having many woes…..
I suppose if everything worked out of the box I never learn anything.

So… I signed up for this C++ class and I’m I’d like to complete my homework assignment using Code::Blocks.
I’ve been really spoiled by the Vb auto code completion and I really would like it working in Code::Blocks.

I’m about 80% sure I had it working before, so something is wrong, probably something subtle and obvious….
So… A little research here lead me here which directed me:http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=FAQ#Q%3A_How_do_I_get_Code_Completion_to_work.3F
First things first, my system just got done updates, I’m just going to reboot to be on the safe side..
Ok… Lets see.

A: Did you check how code completion is configured ? See “Settings/Editor”, click on “Code-completion and symbols browser” in the left column and check the Code completion and C/C++ parser tabs.

;
<

Ok… Everything looks fine… Was I typing 4 characters(Ok…. if something is wrong here I don’t see it..)

Next step

They ‘re mostly useful when you don’t add compiler search dirs in build options but use backticked expressions (e.g. `freetype-config –cflags`). In this case, the parser is not aware of where the source files are located. So, by manually adding the directory in the parser’s search dirs you ‘re actually helping the parser find the files..

Huh… What the heck does that mean? I’m trying to get code completion to work on a program that’s on the level of primordial ooze. (I’m thinking that’s not the issue here.. Wasting a bit too much time here…. I need to get this homework done first without autocompletion (yech!!)
I just cant give it up..
Found some more stuff here..
http://forums.codeblocks.org/index.php/topic,10564.0.html

Ok… I basically got no where sort of fast here…
I just want some features with code completion sort of like my beloved vb6.
So… I decided to try codelite instead of codeblocks from the repositories.
When I ran from the repositories every thing was fine out of the box. IDE doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of code::blocks but from what I recall of when the code completion was working, it seems superior.
It tried upgrading to from Rev2893 from the repository to Rev3681 things got weird. I kept getting “/bin/sh: mingw32-make.exe: not found” eventhough i had the IDE set for g++ . Don’t know don’t care what was going on there. Right now I have code completion working for the kindergarten level of C++ that I’m at so that’s good enough for me.

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I’ve been trying to get a wordpress site up for my wife.

I’ve been trying to use the wp-tables reloaded plug-in along with Station 1.2.1 theme by Plugins.

So far no luck on getting the plug-ins to work. The authors support page had a post with the exact issue that I’m having.

http://tobias.baethge.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-table-reloaded-english/support/

The question of things to check:

this is most likely caused by your theme, which probably shows your posts by using the template tag “the_excerpt()” or a modified version of “the_content()”.

Are other plugins with shortcodes working?

Wordpress hasn’t really been my focus (what the heck is a shortcode), but I do want to keep the wife happy…
So… I found a quick link on how to make a short code…
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/02/mastering-wordpress-shortcodes/
I thought I try the hello world and see if it works. Yep…..
Duh…. Just figured it out… I type the shortcode with the visual tab instead of the HTML.  That makes a world of difference….

I can go to bed happy…

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Well, I’ve been off with the Christmas shut down and you’d think I’d have hours and hours of time accomplishing oodles of stuff.
Well, for some reason it hasn’t worked out that way…. It seems like the diet is blown and my gtd reviews have gotten a bit lax and the list grows a bit longer.

I did manage to get one significant thing done though…. I finally managed to get my wordpress blog updated from 2.1.5…. That is  a nice feeling.

I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire perhaps a few too many… but that’s ok..
I’ve been wanting to get a Stirling engine built as a fun project… I sort of mothballed the Stirling out of the November/December 2005 home shop machinist, in favor of making a ltd Stirling.

The plan was originally to build a bunch for Christmas presents but that was biting a little bit more than I could chew.

I did a bit of surfing(perhaps and little bit too much) and found all kinds of interesting sites with construction plans on ltd stirlings.
I was beyond impressed when I ran across Jan Ridders site http://heetgasmodelbouw.ridders.nu/index.htm .  All I have to say on this is wow.
I wonder if this guy hit the lotto and gets to play all day in his shop….
Anyway.. There was a couple of plans than caught my eye.
This plan uses a couple of CD’s as a flywheel.
http://heetgasmodelbouw.ridders.nu/Webpaginas/pagina_ltd_stirling_met_cds/cd_dstirling_frameset.htm

I also downloaded the tea-cup stirling, which is also cool but I don’t know if I’ll have time for that one.
http://heetgasmodelbouw.ridders.nu/Webpaginas/pagina_stirling_eierdop/eierdop_frameset.htm

I found a bunch of interesting stirling stuff Steam and Engine of Australia . You can easily spend on a couple of hours poking around this site.

Cnccookbook.com has a bunch of stirling links that look interesting also.  This guy has a nice site that’s worth going to.. It’s sort of a executive summary for home shop machinists.

peswiki.com also has a bunch links for stirling.  There’s something about the look and feel about this site is not my favorite.  It sort of kept me from diving into the content…

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This was sort of a fun project for me.  I had this push mower that I had inadvertently busted the roller bracket on when I backed it up hard on my driveway

I had some stock with pre drilled holes in stock which I need to plan down in thickness but my width was perfect. I had a couple of false starts which you see in the picture as I was trying to get the tool group properly. Originally I had this my mill and it wasn’t fun.  The material was hardened and I don’t have a power feed on my mill. Hand cranking was very tedius. The autofeed on the shaper was much nicer.

I’m actually doing a straight downward plunge in this picture.  What I did was take a rough cut.  Measure the width and than adjust the horizontal with the indicator.. It seemed to work pretty good.

In needed to replicate the boss than was in the original part  So, I scribed the center lines and hit it with a optical center punch.  In the picture I’m getting the punch mark zero’d out in my four jaw chuck.

You can see the machined boss in this picture. Here I’m center drilling it, in preparation for drilling and tapping

Here you can I’m tapping the part, using a tap holder I made in a shop class many many years ago.

I wound up using a shoulder bolt of the correct diameter, got some loc-tite and screwed it in. I than cut the head off and rounded what needed to be ground. Hopefully the loc-tite will hold, since I just realized looking at the picture that the stud could in theory unwind. As you can tell from the leaves on the mower its fall and I won’t be mowing the lawn till spring. Hmm…. The blades are sort of dull, I wonder if I could rig something up to sharpen them.

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One of my projects was to replace a worn counter shaft on my ammco metal shaper replace the babbit bearing with Bronze.
A friend with a jig-bore machine the counter shaft for me in his jig-bore to fit the bushings.

I got the thing completely rebuilt, repainted and ready to install and I noticed that the base rocked when I was getting read to  bolt it down.  I suppose I could have shimmed it with some washer but that just seem like a slock solution to me.  Machining the base was out of the question, my mill isn’t big enough to mount the assembly and I couldn’t really dissemble without major pain..
What to do.  So… I thought I give my Armstrong scraping tool a whirl.   The following pictures shows the progression of the scraping project:

A few years back I got Mike Morgans video on scraping and went to town scrapping a cast iron surface plate I had. I wound up giving myself tennis elbow, or should I say scrapping elbow and took a good year to heal. So I you decide to scrape all I have to say is keep the elbow tucked against your body and let your hips do the work.

Now I got the thing almost as flat as a surface plate and life is good…

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Ok… I was looking over my last post and it looks like I was coming off a bad week…. This week seems better but I’ve got some things piling up on my gtd list that I’ve been wanting to get done.

I’ve been taking some pictures of some shop projects that I’ve been wanting to post on my blog.  But they are just way to big.

I’ve had this thread bookmarked for a long time and just haven’t had the time to really go through it: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-518662.html

From what I gather to reduce file size of a picture you can:

• Reduce the image size
• Reduce the number of colors
• Save in a different format

That seems fairly self evident.
Well… lets see what I got here..
I have a series of really pretty pictures of my counter-shaft base of my ammco shaper. Err… starting to get off OT here.. Lets just say, I just have this nice picture buts its big.

I fired up the GIMP (I’m sorry put I can’t help but keep thinking of Pulp Fiction when I write that)and went to Image properties.  Its a JPEG 2272 X 1740 pixels, print size 31.556 X 23.667 Inches, Resolution 72 X 72 ppi, 831 KB.
I did a quick google search “gimp how is print size calculated” and came up with link http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-image-print-size.html

First experiment. Take Image save as Png (compression level 9).
Lets see what I got.  Hmm.. Everything else is the same… file size just shot up to 5.26Mb..

Second experiment.  I just tried Image=>Scale and changed the image scale to 640X480. When I saved as Jpeg it asked me about quality.. I selected 50%. Seemed like a reasonable number. (File size was 40.1 Kb) That’s better.
Let me try that again with maximum quality and see what happens. at Maximum Quality it shoots up to 309.7 KB (picture seems nicer but file size is not that great

I just tried Image mode indexing and save at 85% quality with web colors enabled.  Looks like crap.  Saved as Jpeg at original Original image scale.  File size at 821KB…

Another experiment. I changed to 640 X 480 saved as Png max compression. 536.8 KB

Ok… It’s seems for me at the moment, the best result I came up with using the Gimp, was 640X480 resolution and saved with 50% qc.  I reduced the file size from 831.7 Kb to 40.1 KB.. This seems reasonable..
For now, I’m just going to do this one at a time.  The post had some methods for doing this in batch mode.

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I love these blogs of people who have these perfect projects where everything works perfectly…. Well this ain’t one of those blogs…..

I was mowing my lawn last Sunday with my recycled push-mower and a broke a roller bracket.  No problem… I’ll just make a new one..

So.. I find a piece of steel in the scrap box that’s about right and mount in my mill and start planning away..  This is just taking way longer turning cranks since the material appears to be hardened, so…. I figure, I have this darn shaper with the auto crossfeed, I might as well use it.  Fine… great idea. After all the name of this site is metalshaperman.com

So… I start machining with a bit I had from turning, which totally doesn’t have the right geometry.  It works but belt on the motor is slipping quite a bit.  The belt is really worn so, I get a new one.. Somewhere between a 4L270 and a 4L260…  I get the 4L270 and the thing is loose (but I still have adjustment).  I bring it back to my local Napa and get the 4L260 and the Belt to too tight (No adjustment)..  I figure the original was a 4L260 and it needed to work in a little… So.. I fire up the shaper and I goes a couple of strokes and the friking motor seizes… What the… Anyway, I think what happened is that the motor pulley moved and when is jambed against the housing.  At least that’s what I hope.

Anyway… I figured I thought it be nice to take a couple of pictures of the bracket and the work in progress on the shaper.  So… I’m having all these issues getting a picture uploaded, and now I need to reduce the resolution of my pictures cause they are just way too big….  I found a nice link on how to do that…. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-518662.html

So… my quite time in the morning is all burned up with nothing to show.
Hopefully…. this is not the start of a bad day….

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My little one has been asking me make her a computer game and  some toys out of plastic…  Can’t be wood or metal… Needs to be plastic.

Hmmm. The computergame I think I can handle…. The toys out of plastic is on the todo list..

Wth the weather cooling off, someone being back in school, this has made it convenient again for me to be messing around on the computer….

Heekscad is still a little bit too much for me so, slowing down and going through OpenGl is a good thing.

I stumbled across a very good tutorial series on OpenGl at this site. http://www.videotutorialsrock.com/index.php

It’s actually quite interesting too me.  I’ve been taking it slow to minize brain overload and so far I’ve made why way into part 1 textures.  I’m making a little side trips going through the BMP file format in wikipedia. which is rather interesting in itself.  (Have you hugged you little endian today..)

I managed to get my graphics card really working a few weeks back so this has been fun for me.

I am really impressed by this tutorial…  When I become proficient at OpenCascade I wouldn’t mind doing something like this.

The plastic toy thing is really intriguing to me.   Originally I told my child that oh….we we need to injection mold a toy…. Images of building Vince Gingery Injection Modeling machine and complex machining of a mold came to mind….. Yuckk…. (Way too many irons on the fire for that)… But.. Yah figure I get this OpenGL game thing under my belt… Start doing the Heekscad thing….  What the hey…. Have my child design some toys using solid modeling… Port it out to and STL file and do some rapid prototyping….

There’s actually an open source Rapid Prototyping project.  Man…. there is just way too much interesting stuff out there….. Darn…. I’m going to need to get the rest of the Linistepper drivers build up that are collecting dust…. Hmmm.. I wonder if six year old can solder?  (Just kidding…. )

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I found this link that got me going.

http://www.thinkingserious.com/2008/04/19/fix-nvidia-drivers-after-hardy-heron-rc1-upgrade/

I tried envyNG  a go, and it worked to about but I was unable to enable the custom driver.

I need to retrace some of my previous posts…

Ok… Video card I have

Ok… to see what kind of video card
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Video

jonas@Ubuntu4:~$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420] (rev a3)
jonas@Ubuntu4:~$ lspci -n
00:00.0 0600: 1106:0314
00:00.1 0600: 1106:1314
00:00.2 0600: 1106:2314
00:00.3 0600: 1106:3208
00:00.4 0600: 1106:4314
00:00.7 0600: 1106:7314
00:01.0 0604: 1106:b198
00:0b.0 0401: 1102:0004 (rev 04)
00:0b.2 0c00: 1102:4001 (rev 04)
00:0f.0 0104: 1106:3149 (rev 80)
00:0f.1 0101: 1106:0571 (rev 06)
00:10.0 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.1 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.2 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.3 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.4 0c03: 1106:3104 (rev 86)
00:11.0 0601: 1106:3227
00:11.5 0401: 1106:3059 (rev 60)
00:11.6 0780: 1106:3068 (rev 80)
00:12.0 0200: 1106:3065 (rev 78)
01:00.0 0300: 10de:0172 (rev a3)
jonas@Ubuntu4:~$

Ok… At the moment I’m reading a the documentation for 96.43.05 Driver which tells me that this is the correct driver for this card.
I have that on my EnvyNG list of drivers installed….. So I’m going to give that a go.

I read somewhere about firing up

jonas@Ubuntu4:~$ nvidia-settings

Clicking through the tabs, I think I found my issue.

Fail to query the GLX server vendor.

This looks real promising
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1148293&highlight=Fail+query+GLX+server+vendor.

Ok.. so I think

So
I ran this

ERROR: Please run nvidia-bug-report.sh as root.
jonas@Ubuntu4:~/Desktop$ sudo Run nvidia-bug-report.sh
[sudo] password for jonas:
sudo: Run: command not found
jonas@Ubuntu4:~/Desktop$ sudo nvidia-bug-report.sh

Running nvidia-bug-report.sh… complete.

The file nvidia-bug-report.log has been created; please send this report,
along with a description of your bug, to linux-bugs@nvidia.com.

jonas@Ubuntu4:~/Desktop$ gedit nvidia-bug-report.log

And it looks like the issue is this:

-> Kernel messages:
[ 55.369842] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
[ 55.913898] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[ 55.913902] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04. Please
[ 55.913903] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[ 55.913904] NVRM: components have the same version.
[ 61.003630] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[ 61.003634] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04. Please
[ 61.003636] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[ 61.003637] NVRM: components have the same version.
[ 66.305597] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[ 119.239670] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[ 119.240249] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[ 119.301101] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 1
[ 120.618839] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[ 120.620711] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[ 120.621217] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[ 4178.822549] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4178.823091] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4178.823240] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4178.823470] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.021178] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4179.021589] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4179.021773] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.022040] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4754.206098] NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 Kernel Module 96.43.09 Mon

Ok… So According to the ubuntu thread I need to remove everything Nvidia, reboot and let envyNG do it’s thing….
Ok…

Soo…. Need to publish now if things go real bad…

Thing’s to not go real bad… But the “Fail to query the GLX server vendor” issue still persists.

Ok… But the thread continues..

So…. Rerunning the Nvidia bug Report… I find this message which looks less errorish than the last run.

-> Kernel messages:
[   55.369842] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
[   55.913898] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[   55.913902] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04.  Please
[   55.913903] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[   55.913904] NVRM: components have the same version.
[   61.003630] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[   61.003634] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04.  Please
[   61.003636] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[   61.003637] NVRM: components have the same version.
[   66.305597] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[  119.239670] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[  119.240249] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[  119.301101] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 1
[  120.618839] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[  120.620711] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[  120.621217] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[ 4178.822549] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4178.823091] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4178.823240] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4178.823470] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.021178] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4179.021589] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4179.021773] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.022040] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4754.206098] NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 Kernel Module  96.43.09  Mon

Ok.. What I get out of this. I tried to stick in 96.43.05 but the system was squaking that it had 71.86.04 in it. It seems that my card is supported by 71.86.04… So I guess I should try this process again and have EnvgNG install 71.86.04 and see what happen??

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/71.86.04/README/README.txt

Ok… Now that’s weird… Things are behaving different but still not working… Nvidia-Settings is squaking even more and I get the same error message even though I installed the 71.86.04 driver (I think I did……
> Kernel messages:
[

55.369842] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
[ 55.913898] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[ 55.913902] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04. Please
[ 55.913903] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[ 55.913904] NVRM: components have the same version.
[ 61.003630] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 96.43.05, but
[ 61.003634] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 71.86.04. Please
[ 61.003636] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
[ 61.003637] NVRM: components have the same version.
[ 66.305597] eth0: no IPv6 routers present [ 119.239670] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[ 119.240249] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[ 119.301101] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 1
[ 120.618839] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[ 120.620711] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[ 120.621217] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[ 4178.822549] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4178.823091] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4178.823240] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4178.823470] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.021178] agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
[ 4179.021589] agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
[ 4179.021773] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4179.022040] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[ 4754.206098] NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 Kernel Module 96.43.09 Mon
Oct 27 14:23:30 PST 2008
->

[EDIT]

Ok… I wound up getting everything running using the 96.43.05 driver by following instructions on jekins July 2nd, 2009 post

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone and saw there was a newly update 96.43.13 driver.  So… I loaded that up a couple of times and the moment, everything works great except that I get this white screen of death when I load up a terminal session.  Overall performance is pretty good, I have a email in with Nvidia and from what I searched on the net, I think I need some tweak to my xorg.config  so I’m going to put that aside for a moment and see if I can get my sound blaster card working now.

Ok… I got the white screen of death fixed…. See.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7857898#post7857898

Just in stalled emerald… All Good…
Now I’m attempting the cube.

http://maketecheasier.com/make-your-ubuntu-desktop-rotate-as-a-cylindersphere/2008/07/28

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