Like everyone else, I have been roped into looking at Circuit City’s liquidation deals (or the lack thereof).  I walked in there with a basic need of finding a good deal on a Canon Rebel XSi for the upcoming storm chasing year.  Even with 30 percent off, it’s still what I can get it for online.  Oh well.  Those who know me will definitely remember that I am always looking for the deals and hardly ever pay close to retail for anything.  What can I say, if I wore corduroy pants I would start a fire.

What I did come across that made the trip worthwhile was their “fixture” table.  This is where they were selling off bags of screws, hardware, and the likewise from their car audio installation shop, and other general odds and ends from around the office.  For a total of ten dollars, I bought roughly a 500 count of screws in a bag used for mounting speakers in boxes ($4), a bag of 4 speaker terminals ($5, maybe that was a little high in retrospect), and an HP Jetdirect 175x with no power supply for $1.

Immediately after returning home, I opened the bag containing the print server.  To much dismay, there was a special DC input that none of the 100’s of power supply bricks in my designated cardboard box would fit.  Perhaps I would have to break down and buy a replacement…..

All prices for replacements were in the neighborhood of $27 dollars after price and shipping.  Still better than a brand new unit at $129, but you all know I wasn’t about to go out like that either!  I remembered the Jetdirect print server I took out of service a few years ago (I don’t throw anything away, and don’t think I payed one red cent for this print server, either).  It worked well, but I no longer had printers with parallel ports so it ceased to be of use.  Whatdya know….years of production apart, and a quick Google search confirms the power supply part numbers match!  Only I could be so lucky……

(Click images for full size)

Now I have a functioning USB print server, for $1.

By the way, for those of you looking to eventually take advantage of Circuit City’s liquidation prices, they change them every Thursday morning.  I’m not sure whether they make them higher or lower at this point, but I thought I would relay that piece of knowledge nonetheless.

Recently, I wrote about my hard drive crashing.  In fact, I am sure it was the last thing you heard from me.

I was able to get back up and running with a drive I salvaged out of an old HP laptop (circa 2001).  It hummed like a jet engine, but was sufficient until my new drive came in from Newegg.

So, what to do with all of the configured software on the jet engine drive?  Since I never had used Norton Ghost for drive copy before, I decided to give it a test run.  Previously, I’ve used Ghost images in a lab environment to reimage desktops after classes to ensure viruses, etc weren’t on there, and to start them out with a clean slate for the incoming class.

When the new drive came in from Newegg, I attempted to use Ghost 14 to do a direct drive copy to my USB attached hard drive with the blank hard drive from the hard drive in the laptop, humming like a jet engine.  First of all, Ghost still doesn’t recognize USB storage devices in recovery mode, which means I would have to do the hard drive copy within the operating system.  After I did the drive copy from within Windows, I switched the hard drive out.  Upon booting up, I got one of those nice “I/O error: cannot read drive” errors, or something to that effect.  Epic fail.  I really didn’t feel like figuring out why that was happening, and as an end user, I shouldn’t have to.

I took the Ghost disk out and frisbee’d it across the room (my backup copy of course).  I popped in MHDD and erased the hard drive from block 0 and restored the default MBR.

At this point, I popped in Helix, it mounted BOTH the internal drive, and USB hard drive upon startup.

After the LiveCD OS came online, I opened a command shell and ran the command:

“dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda”

20 minutes later, I booted out of Helix, and booted into Windows on the new hard drive.

Norton Ghost might be good for preimaging things and setting them aside, but for notebook drive to drive copy, it sucks.  And for free, Helix does the job just fine.

One word of advice for Symantec: Get with the program or ALL of your software will suck.  Oh wait, too late.

This past May I had the fortunate experience of riding with Kent Britain, WA5VJB to the Dayton Hamvention in Ohio (he may tell you otherwise). Among other things, Kent is an exceptional antenna designer, with projects on his resume that include antennas that were conceived to reside in the second stomach of a cow (Try to figure out THAT dielectric constant!). You may have read his articles in CQ and CQ VHF magazines. He kind of knows a thing or two. I crap you negative.

Anyway, what I came to tell you about are a unique design approach Kent has for low cost antennas. Before Dayton, a group that I do some hobby work with was looking for a directional WiFi antenna to interface with a Linksys WRT-54G router that was powered by PoE (power over ethernet) and mounted to the side of a piece of antenna mast. The project was created out of necessity to reach a ranger station that was just out of reach for our stock omnidirectional antennas. We ordered some of these from Kent:

What you see are two high gain antennas for 2.4 GHz designed onto printed circuit boards! Here are the datasheets:

Quad Patch antenna datasheet (sadly, this antenna has been discontinued)

Yagi antenna datasheet

We ended up using the Quad Patch for a few reasons. First, we could easily mount it to the side of the weatherproof telecom box we strapped to the tower (the router was mounted inside). The polarization needed by the Yagi to work did not line up with the tower leg we were using. Second, according to the datasheet, ir provides 11 dBi gain, which, in retrospect, was overkill, but who cares.
They work GREAT and do a lot better than a “cantenna”, (Which, if you model it with antenna software, has some serious flaws).

So, if you are on a budget, or just want a great antenna for your project, I highly recommend you check out Kent’s website over at http://www.wa5vjb.com. More on our WiFi project in a later article…..for now, go build your own!