Fall in Texas

Fall is here... so is beautiful weather. No excuses for me not to ride bicycle with my daughter. She is growing so fast now. Her road bike is too small for her so she is enjoying the "project" bike we made last year.

My corner...

Time to clean this place... Although it is kind of clean as compared to "normal state". Left lower corner some of my unsorted retro micros (Tandy 102 Portable Computer, Tandy CoCo 3, Commodore 64C, Atari ST color monitor). On the shelf, some books on retro computers such as Atari ST Internals, unsorted 1/43 scale cars, IEEE Spectrum... Both my office laptop and home HP running Ubuntu Linux 8.04... and other "creative" mess I live in...

Citroen 2CV "Spachek" by Norev (scale 1/43)

Yet another Citroen 2CV in my collection ("Spachek" as we called it). This one also came from eBay directly from China without display case. The bottom says it is Norev model. Has a fairly nice level of details, especially the decals on the side. It has working shocks and the roof can be taken off.

Citroen GS by Altaya (scale 1/43)

Another "luxury" car that could be seen on the streets in former Yugoslavia in the days I was growing up. This model has those yellow headlights, which was typical for a French version (that is where Citroen is coming from). Yugoslavian version had "normal" white headlights. That is about only difference coming to my mind.

In Search for Perfect Bread (part 6)

It has been a while of me playing with the dough. Today we used the bread machine (trusty Breadman) to prepare the dough. We used "standard" simple recipe with just flour, warm water, yeast, and little bit of salt and sugar.

It takes less than an hour to get the Breadman done with the dough.

Then you take it out, punch down, and knead for about two minutes. We put some butter at the bottom of the pan and sprinkled some flour. Then we put the dough in the middle.

I like to poke the dough with a fork to let more air into it.

Let it rise again for about an hour. The volume should increase at least two times.

Preheat the oven to 380 Fahrenheit and then bake for about 45 minutes. We turned broiling (top heater at 550 F) at the end for like 1-2 minutes. Be careful with broiling as you can burn it.

Wet your fingers with water and carefully touch the top. Cover it with cloth and wait to cool off on a wire rack.

I am ready for test drive. Some smoked bacon, butter spread, and sliced onion. Yes, I know. Not healthy, but feels good.

Watburg 353 (scale 1/43)

Getting ready for Holloween

A picture is worth 1000 words...

Mini Me

My son and I went for a short ride to the park. He was on his "big" machine. For me the biggest challenge was to manage my balance while riding this slow.
He kept talking all the way.



Being in this part of Texas we are surrounded by fire ants wherever you go. As a little "science project" we located few good ant hills and few stick and poke the ant hills to demonstrate how aggressive fire ants are.

Citroen Ami 8 (scale 1/43)

Another nice 1/43 model. I like the level of details on this one. Wish it had license plates on it. This was a car from glorious times of 2CV. It had that same sound of the engine, but it was a roomier car in kind of "station wagon"curvy shape. French cars were (and possibly are) always interesting design wise. This car had front wheels when you turn them would stay under certain angle (not perpendicular to the ground). It also had a weird steering wheel connected only at one spot. Will try to find a picture of a real one.

No Splash Screen Ubuntu 8.04 on Dell Dimension 2400

Intro
I have a friend whose Windows finally died on their Dell Dimension 2400. After they spent some money trying to resolve the issue with anti-virus and other Security software they finally gave up. The Dimension 2400 is actually a nice PC (512MB, 40GB, 2.8G P4). We decided to put Ubuntu on it and give it some life.

Saving Data
We booted the thing with Ubuntu Live CD. It had an issue with automated mounting of the Windows NTFS partition. However, Ubuntu gave a suggestion hot to mount the disk from a command line and force mount in order to ignore errors on the disk.
After the mount, we were able to copy their "My Documents" folder onto the flash disk and save their photos.
After saving their data, we ran the Ubuntu install. I pretty much followed the steps I typically do (check the blogy entry from April). I skipped installing some programs not needed for their kid (Netbeans and some development and system tools).

Splash Screen Issue
The only issue we had is that there was no splash screen during the boot into Ubuntu. One great thing about the Ubuntu is that if you have an issue there is a big chance someone else had it before you. I found a solution that worked on different PCs and seems it worked for this one:

• Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file and add these two modules:
  fbcon
  vesafb

• After that, edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer file and comment the following lines with #:
  blacklist vesafb

• update the kernel image with the following command:
  sudo update-initramfs -u

• then install startup manager with the command:
  sudo apt-get install startupmanager

• now you can run Startup Manager from System:Administration menu and specigy options and screen size (I used 1024x768 here)

I have a similar PC that my daughter uses that has the same issue. Will try it there as well.

Lada Niva VAZ 2121 (scale 1/43)

Now this is something: a nice Russian 1/43 scale model of Lada Niva (VAZ 2121). I kept my eye on these for a long time. Finally got me one. One of the cutes little SUVs ever made. Very small, light, and versatile. And folks, this was a real SUV. You could drive this through deep mud, snow, or whatever. Not like these new soccer mom's SUVs.

It had a look of a small car from the outside. The model is fantastic. As you can see the steering works on the front wheels. It also has "real" suspension.

This is a metal model and everything on it pretty much opens and looks like the real one. You can even pull out the spare wheel.
It is kind of hard to see, but it has "real" suspension and steering wheel mechanism. Pretty cool for a 1/43 scale. The level of details and used materials is superb.
Little comparison with another 1/43 model. The cabin is not much bigger than a small car if not smaller inside.

Skoda 1000 MB (scale 1/43)

Another nice model in my series "The cars we loved in ex-Yugoslavia". This is Skoda 1000 MB from 60s, maybe early 70s. This was common in the area I grew up and what I love about this model this color was common for those cars, too.

It was a decent size car as compared to "little giant" Renault 4.

This is "almost" like looking at a parking lot in front of my old building. Almost here assuming you beeing a kid like I am. Pretty cool cars.