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The Visual Study of Vacuum Tubes
Understanding how to perform the visual study of vacuum tubes can enable you to readily identify the unique characteristics and applications of a given tube.
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The Unmatched Beauty of the Rhodes Electric Piano
No matter your favorite genre, if you’re practicing the piano, the Rhodes electric piano is an instrument with a deserving warm and distinctive tone. It was the first model in a line of tine-based electric pianos designed and manufactured by Harold Rhodes in the late-1950s. Here I share details about my own, examples of the Rhodes sound, and options for reproducing it yourself.
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Studiologic Numa X Piano GT: A Well-Rounded Digital Piano
A look at how Studiologic’s cost-effective, practical flagship compares to more expensive options like the newly released Nord Stage 4.
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The EICO 667 Vacuum Tube Tester
This guide explains how to use the EICO Model 667 Dynamic Conductance Tube and Transistor Tester to test vacuum tubes. It provides step-by-step instructions for testing a tube, including setting the knobs and sliders, inserting the tube, and conducting a merit test. The guide is intended for anyone who needs to test vacuum tubes and wants to ensure they follow the proper process to avoid damaging any tubes or their tester.
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Artifacts of Unbridled Consumerism
Left unchecked, consumerism has negative implications for our planet and future generations. In this post, we will explore its effects on individuals and society.
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Metamorphosis: Variety is the Spice of Life
After a long hiatus, I am back with a new focus on soft skills, leadership, economic uncertainty, and personal growth.
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Build Your Own Home Router
Today we’re going to build a router. Yes, that’s right, we’re venturing into networking, which for many is uncharted, technically daunting territory. Together we will work through all of the steps required to build a high performance, Linux-based router I have named alpha — almost totally from scratch. What’s more, when it comes to speed, reliability, security, and customization, the router we build will […]
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Setup a Headless Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie on OS X
To celebrate Halloween I’ve decided to put together a guide that will show you how to install Raspbian Jessie, the (as of this writing) most current version of the Debian operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The biggest difference between this guide and the hundreds if not thousands of other guides out there on the […]
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Updating the BIOS firmware on the Supermicro X9DRW-iF
Yesterday evening I posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to flash/update the IPMI firmware on the X9DRW-iF server from Supermicro. Today I’m going to explain how to flash the BIOS on the same hardware. If you’re not familiar with what a BIOS firmware flash is, there’s no shame in not knowing, here is a good explanation. I’ve found the documentation out on the web to be scattered at best, and a little bit confusing. This is why I thought I’d put together a start-to-finish guide here, where we’ll create our own custom bootable ISO, and use it to update to a specific BIOS firmware for the X9DRW-iF.
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Flashing the IPMI firmware on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF
I recently tasked myself with bringing IPMI up to date on a Supermicro X9DRW-iF server. This can be quite dangerous, as a bad IPMI flash can break IPMI in a way that requires you end up having to mail your hardware (RMA) to Supermicro to get it re-flashed. As such, I’m not hugely fond of doing these sorts of things through a web interface, as it depends on the network, and the Supermicro web interface doesn’t give you much in the way of feedback during the firmware upgrade process. Today, I’ll be sharing what I found to be the most stable way of flashing the IPMI firmware on an X9DRW-iF. We’ll be doing so from an OS that is installed on the hardware itself — in our case from CentOS 6.6 (this would very likely work just fine on a Debian-based OS as well).