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more bass knowledge

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German wikipedia provided something interesting. The resonance effect is working best from 0,75*fb to 2*fb (resonance frequency of the enclosure). Subwoofer normally operate from approx. 20Hz to 80Hz.

The previous owner tuned the enlosure to 27Hz, to work nicely from 20Hz to 54Hz. It would have been interesting to adjust the crossover (80Hz, 4th order in my case) to 54Hz and to run it as a deep bass addon with my living room stereo. But since I’m running it with small satellite speakers on my desk 27Hz – 72Hz seems like a good choice…

Adventures on ebay / more bass

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My Desktop Stereo isn’t quite performing as I want it to. The JBL Control One are awesome but have no bass. Bi Amping with a leftover subwoofer from my station wagon didn’t really do the trick, a 25cm speaker is ok for a confined space like a car but sucks in bigger rooms as for example my office. Ebay provided some auctions with interesting items and I got lucky: A Hifonics OLM 1615 38cm Monster with a vamped up enclosure of a much cheaper omnitronics speaker.

0,33L beer bottle for size comparison..

0,33L beer bottle for size comparison..

DIY at it’s best, so it went cheap. 76€ for something that’s worth a couple of hundreds is more than alright. Then something weird happened:

Seller: I would like to cancel the deal because I dropped the speaker and there’s some rattling noise inside / something broke even though there’s no visual damage. I’m willing to pay some compensation for your troubles.

Me: Well, I can totally understand if you’re not satisfied with the price but it’s not my problem if you don’t keep track of your auctions. These speakers are designed to take quite a beating so it seems highly unlikely you broke it by dropping it. Are you really sure it’s broken?

Seller: Yeah, it’s broken. I’d send you 50€ if you cancel the transaction.

Me: Maybe I can repair the speaker. How about we take the 50€ off the price, so I pay you 26€. If I can’t fix it I still got the enclosure and you got rid of the broken speaker…

Seller: No thanks, I’d rather bring it to my dealership to get it fixed and then sell it on ebay again.

Me (to myself): Gotcha!

Me (to seller): Sorry to say but you raised my suspicions. By german law we have got a contract so you dropped my speaker and not yours. You owe me compensation for the difference between the 70€ and the normal street value of the item. In addition I’ll contact ebay’s customer support and they’ll probably ban you.

Seller: Alright, I’ll get the speaker fixed and then send it to you but it will take some time.

Seller (next day): It’s fixed, a large paperclip somehow got stuck inside. It’s on it’s way.

So yeah, there are quite some dickheads on ebay. The speaker arrived in the meantime, it’s got some minor scratches and the crossover is fried. The capacitor blew and the circuit board got cracks. Luckily I’m using active crossovers anyway, so I realized that while removing it. So I already fixed one problem. The sound is still not where I want it but the vents of the enclosure are loose and possibly to close to the back of the enclosure. I guess I’ll do the math on it as well, just in case the previous owner fucked it up.

 

Adventure XBOX 360 #2

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After almost a month of waiting the support managed to fix my account. Since then I use the XBOX mostly for streaming TV from Watchever.de. It’s working not exactly stable and the program choices are somewhat limited. I have to pay xbox live gold fees + watchever fees which total at approx. 12€ / month. So the only justification for using the xbox is that watchever only runs on Windows (and on Linux using pipelight, a software running silverlight in a virtual machine). All in all I’m not too happy with this setup. I guess I have to move on to the next provider…

Not much too blog about

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Odo: 289778
Location: Sweden, between Vänern Lake and Oslo

Driving and working was the program for the last couple of days. I crossed through Norway and did only a short stopover at a place of a friend from the workshop who moved to Norway last year. A most welcome possibility to wash my clothes and sheets and take a looong, warm shower. I switched the tires of the van from front to back because the front ones were run down on the sides due to some misalignment of the axle and probably my driving style as well. Now I have the tires with more profile on the front axle. My father always told me to put them on the rear axle on a rear wheel drive to not get stuck. A friend in Australia with offroad experience told me just the opposite: Getting bogged is not appreciated but doesn’t hurt. The inability to brake or steer can hurt…

The distance I covered doesn’t seem that much for the time taken but since the speed limit is 60 to 80 kp/h and I’m the only driver it was quite some driving. After some audiobooks about social life I switched to some fantasy (The Dark Elf Trilogy), which will probably see me home and beyond.

After being almost alone in the cold for a whole month I’m thoroughly fed up with it. I guess I needed the experience to get some stuff sorted out and to better learn how to take care of myself (how to keep a good mood, don’t eat too much crap, …) Now I’d like to hang with folks again. Wild phantasies of my sofa, the video beamer and a nice trip to Los Santos cross my mind more often as well. I’m still unsure if I will only stay in Hannover for a short stopover or if the current trip will end there. At least I already reserved a spot in the workshop, the van (and I) should be good to go again by the end of October.

Today my gas (LPG) bottle ran out, using the heater for more than two weeks straight might be the reason. I still have the 5kg spare which should see me home. Filling a german bottle in sweden is reported to be tricky and expensive… I guess I will buy a special bottle which is legal to be filled with LPG at gas stations.

(posted one day after writing)

The east of Norway

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image

The nature over here is much more scenic than in the south of scandinavia, they got mountains as well as “real” ocean with waves and everything, not so boring as the baltic sea. Since Norway is not a member of the EU they make their own laws for importing stuff so the amounts of for example alcohol to import tax-free is ridiculous. They consider beer to have max 4.7 percent of alcohol. Pilsener has 4.9 to 5.1 so it goes in the vine category which means you are allowed to bring 3 (in words: three) liters per person. “Luckily” there is not much beer left after almost two months of travelling so I wasn’t tempted to become a smuggler…

I’m still not fully recovered from having a cold but I feel more or less alright. Slow days, plenty of reading and short walks. I met a nice german traveller, visited Vadso, Vardo and Hamningberg. Yesterday I saw kickass northern lights and will hopefully soon edit these (and the ones from oulu) and upload them At the moment I’m on my way back to head up north the Tana river to finally arrive at the only more or less fixed destination of this journey: The North cape.

Getting online was tricky as well arriving in the least populated area in the country on a saturday evening. SIM Cards are not sold everywhere like in the rest of scandinavia, you have to go to a special shop. After some asking around I found the shop in the city/island of Vardo, 2000 inhabitants. The number of choices of different prepaid options over here was exactly one and you have to say your name but show no passport. Norwegians have to register the SIM card with their personal identification number from their passport. The SIM I got is for phoning and not internet so traffic is expensive. Around 50c/MB. But there’s a cap on daily costs at 10 crownes (1,3€). There is a traffic limit of 100MB/day as well. So in the end I have got 3GB/month for almost 40€ delivered in a weird way. At least it works reasonably well, I’m north of Vadso in a quite remote area and still have reception…