Sway Bar Links

Okay so, there was an extremely annoying clank every time I drove over rough road and I had no idea what it was. Thanks to James we narrowed it down to the Sway Bar Links or the Control Arms. Since the Sway Bar Links only cost $36 and the Control Arms are like $150 we tried the links first. These are the pics of the old ones. Not only were they going bad the threads were also rusted as hell (they're 12 years old). I finally got to the point where I had the hack saw them off. The first one was extremely hard -- the nut barely turned and I was killing myself on it. Oh oh, also there were no lifts open so I did all of this on jack stands. Once I finally had enough room to hack saw it - I did. The second one was a tiny bit easier because one of the guys in the shop had some liquid wrench. However even after soaking it for like 10 minutes (I didn't wait very long because I was paying for stall time)I was able to unscrew it almost all the way. It finally got stuck at the very end and I had to hack saw it also. I should mention that I also took off a lot of the rust with a steel brush on the second one but in the end there was just too much.

So to make a long story short, the new ones are on and here are the old ones. Note how mangled they are and the extreme amount of rust on the end/nut. But most importantly the car no longer clunks on rough roads!!!





This one almost made it, but alas no.


This is the area with two flat sides in order to keep is stationary while taking the nut off. I sure showed that thing...

(DIGIT MACRO ROCKS!)

Alright alright... I climbed back under the car and here are the new ones installed...

Even Microsoft's mice are stupid!

For some reason the forward and back buttons on my Microsoft Intellimouse don't automatically work with my OpenSuSE 10.2 distro. So all you do to fix this is:

edit /etc/X11/XF86Config

and add a line under this section:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Name" "Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical"
Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
Option "Vendor" "Sysp"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7" #ADD THIS LINE
EndSection


Also, just as a small side note. Be sure to save a backup of XF86Config before making any changes so you don't mess something up and have to reinstall your OS (speaking from personal experience).

And I bid you all - a good day.

WiFi Antenna

Here it is, our awesome new cantenna:














Thank you very much to my Father-in-law who perfectly crafted this for us. It works beautifully!!!

imagemagick Script

Save this as a .sh file then run with bash to create a crapload of thumbnails out of your photos.

for file in *.jpg
do
convert -resize 400 "$file" thumb_"$file"
done


Fanks!

Making NASlite and Mac OS X 10.4 play nice...

Because NASlite does not use password encryption on your files you need to
tell you Mac that everything will be okay with a little nsmb.conf file:

sudo vi /etc/nsmb.conf (NOTE! not smb.conf)

[default]
minauth=none

save the file ( :wq in vi)

Thanks to the guys from serverelements (the people who make naslite for the solution).

NOTE! This does however pose a security risk...