millerjs.org

August 2021

• Quicksilver PSU Fan…

  Most PowerMac G4s are about 20 years old now, which means they all need some degree of work to run as well as they did when they were new. Fans are one of the most common replacements needed, and in most G4s, the fan in the power supply is the first to go. This post exists to serve as a basic guide for how to replace that fan. In the case of my Quicksilver, it is a standard 80mm x 80mm x 25mm PC fan. I used a part pulled from a few-years-old office PC. It's worth noting that the it only needs power and ground, PWM and sense lines on most modern fans are not connected at all. In my case, I cut them off. To start, power off the machine and open it. I removed the HDD carriers to give a bit more space. Remove the optical drive carrier. There are four screws, two at the top, one underneath, and one on the front panel. These screws are the same. It will take some wiggling to get it to come out, and expect the power cables to be VERY stiff if they haven't been removed before. Now remove the…

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May 2021

• More TimeHats!

  Back in April of this year, a renewed interest on the Time Nuts mailing list developed regarding my TimeHats. The first run of them back at the beginning of the year was fairly small, only 20 units, and only about 15 of them went to folks on the TimeNuts list. They developed a good reputation and I received some very positive public feedback - prompting more interest. I posted saying that I hadn't planned on making more than those initial 20, but that I hadn't yet developed a new revision, so if people were interested I could do another run of identical units, I just needed to know how many parts to order. The interest ended up being more significant than I had anticipated. A lot more! To the tune of about 150 as it stands today. Due to the current global parts shortage I decided against taking any kind of pre-orders (though it would have helped financially) because I didn't know if I would run into any issues delivering units. At the moment I am waiting for the second big delivery of…

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April 2021

• Spring Cleaning!

  Spring has sprung here in Maine, so it's time to clean some computer equipment. Today, we're going to start with Jennay, my HP DL380 G9 which acts as the primary server on my network for both production and lab uses. After shutting down the lab VMs and migrating the production VMs to a temporary host, the cleaning could commence! This box had 120 days uptime prior to being taken down, which is pretty good for me. First, we have to clean the top of the server itself, which tends to take the role of a sort of shelf in my rack. Mostly a junk shelf. It also holds our cable modem, an external hard drive, two Pis with GPS clock duties, and the UPS for the network gear. The cables on this stuff are all long enough that they can be moved aside without being powered down. And now it's clean! Don't forget to install your UPS-supporting cat food container. Then we can take it outside and get a closer look at what we have. Lots of buildup on these side vents by the power supplies. Using the…

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March 2021

• TimeHat ❤ Nokia FYGM

  For the past few monts GNSS-disciplined time servers have been taking up a large percentage of my hobby time. Building and distribuiting the TimeHat went very well, and it gave me a bit of extra capital to dig into a few things that I might not have been able to otherwise, like picking up some "real" GNSS timing modules! The unit I was most interested in was the Nokia FYGM, a GNSS timing receiver made to work with Nokia cell site equipment. The FYGM has a u-blox LEA-M8T, one of the better timing-focused u-blox modules available. Lots of people buy these (and other) timing modules from decomissioned cell sites through Chinese scrappers and recyclers just to harvest the receiver, but I wanted to keep them as "together" as possible. Unlike typical hobbyist GNSS modules, the FYGM has a some extra hardware on it, namely an 8051 MCU. I have more information on this on the wiki, here, so I'll keep this short. To start, why not simply emancipate the M8T from this board? I…

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