Idle Noises-SOLVED

This evening, I asked my dad to help me diagnose the rattle in my car's engine bay. After a brief trip down the road and a listen to the whirs and thunks emerging from the firewall, he suggested that the problem might be with the throw out bearing in the transmission. Looking into this possibility, I discovered that Mazda and Ford manual transmissions commonly produce something called "gear rollover noise."  This sound is generated from the teeth of the transmission gears as they collide, while the car is not in gear.  This noise is the result of vibration from  the engine carrying through to the transmission. In some transmissions, including that of the Mazdaspeed3, the actual gears are designed primarily to engage quickly and move efficiently, as opposed to moving with buttery smoothness and operating silently. This choice of goals results in additional noise when the gears are not engaged, such as during the engine cool down period when the transmission is in neutral. Problem solved. Of course, if the gear noise ever continues when the clutch is depressed and a gear is selected, then the throw out bearing is probably shot.  As a side note, if you are having a similar issue and would like to reduce this noise, you could a) try very heavy transmission oil, b) install a much heavier, dual-mass flywheel, or c) purchase a custom-made transmission that has closer tolerances between the individual gears.

Idle Noises

Last month I came to a solution for my car dilemma. The local(ish) Mazda dealer was selling a used Mazdaspeed3 in great condition at a good price. After living with this turbocharged hatchback for a month, I can report that it is as awesome as car magazines would lead you to believe it is; it's a bit like hearing your favorite song come on the radio, followed by a comforting announcement that all the lousy songs have been banished from the station's library. I know in my soul that the people who engineered this car love AC/DC and loathe O.A.R. The main change that leads to this spirit of aggressive excess is the turbocharged, direct-injection 2.3 liter engine. Once the turbo spins up (3,000 rpm), the 280 lb-ft of torque carry the car along nicely. Horsepower is limited to 230 in first gear to reduce the risk of torque-steering into a cyclist or pedestrian. Once third gear hits, the full 263 HP become available. Zero to sixty takes a little over 5.5 seconds, the quarter mile is covered in about 14.0 seconds at 100 MPH, and top speed is electronically limited to 155 MPH. This bar stool trivia is all well and good, but there is one issue with my new car that been been vexing me. When the car is at idle, usually during its compulsory turbo cool down period, the engine rattles. This noise is enigmatic, but I have a few theories. Theory one: a motor mount is worn out from excessive hooliganry by the previous owner. Since the car found its way onto the dealer lot via a repo due to non-payment, I have concluded that the old owner must have been spending his (would a woman actually buy this car? Send your thoughts.) money on car maintenance and 91 octane fuel. In addition, if this mount were heading south, my research has led me to believe that it would be causing major gearbox problems. Since I do not have any problems shifting, unless I am causing them, this theory seems unlikely. A second theory centers around the car's connecting rods. The two options here are either a bent rod from overuse, or an out-of-balance rod from the factory's forging process. Again, this solution doesn't work because the noise would become more pronounced as rpm increase, and some vibration issues would be expected. The third and final theory centers on the engine's direct fuel injection system. To a much greater extent than a port or throttle body injection system, direct injection systems can vary the air to fuel ratio within the combustion chamber. At high load conditions, like passing a string of SUV's with New Jersey license plates, simply to aggravate them, the mixture is very rich. This provides plenty of fuel to make power and also cools the combustion charge, allowing for a higher compression ratio in the case of a turbocharged engine. At very low loads, like idle, the mixture can run at a very lean ratio, saving fuel. I think my engine noise may just be some occasional knock from this super-lean condition. Of course, there could be a screwdriver from JiffyLube running around the engine bay, as well.

A Great Problem

The major focus of my teenage years was on cars. While a youth, several years ago, I dreamed of the day when I could get a real job and finally buy an awesome car. Like a 1998 Camaro. You get the idea. Anyway, time has gone by, and I find myself in an interesting position. My current car is leased and can be returned to the manufacturer in August. At that time, my two options are to either purchase my existing (sporty economy) car, or find something else to drive. The sensible young adult in me says to buy the economy car off its lease. After all, that car has only accumulated 53,000 miles, and is in very good shape. On the other hand, heading into marriage and the specter of children, this is my last chance to buy a cool car. So, do I do the practical thing and keep my current car, or go nuts and buy a fire-breathing performance machine?

Cybernator: A Movie Describing 2010

People who have jobs in the field of futurism try their best to predict how the world will turn out at some point down the road. Elements of this practice can be seen throughout the sci-fi genre. For instance, hand-held communicators in the original Star Trek series foreshadowed today's cell phones. Often, screenwriters will try to outguess the trends of tomorrow and then extrapolate their likely course over time. As another example, this is how we can go from the artificial heart (today's reality), to Robocop in "the near future."

One movie that made very little or no use of futurism, despite being set in the future and telling a story about cyborgs, is Cybernator. This 1991 indie film from Simitar Productions is a great reminder of why low budget sci-fi is such a difficult genre to work in. I have plenty of ideas that would lead to fantastic, bad sci-fi movies. I also have the good sense not to raise $50,000 from my relatives, hire some community theater actors, and actually film these movies. Robert Rundle, director of Cybernator, would disagree with me on that last point.

In the event that anyone would like to watch this movie with the goal of enjoying its creamy plot twists, I will not reveal any critical story points here. Instead, here is a brief flavor of some key themes and attributes of the movie that will help the reader to judge whether or not Cybernator is their sort of movie:
-There is a morbidly obese belly dancer included in a needless scene that goes on for too long.
-There is a scene in which a mildly attractive woman dances go-go style (with tassels) in a strip club. It should be noted that the end of this scene is devoted to the stripper, Blue, delivering a strident speech about how she is only working as an exotic dancer to pay her tuition bill.
-Also featuring the go-go stripper is a hugely overlong and graphic sex scene. This made me recheck the rating on the DVD box. Still R. It may be telling that one of the screen shots for the chapter buttons on the menu of the DVD is a picture of this woman's nipple from the sex scene. Enough said.
-Most of the cyborgs in Cybernator either dress like Kanye West, or appear completely human.
-A major villain, Captain Hair, is a cyborg who looks speaks just like Dee Snyder.
-All special effects and titles are below the level that can be achieved in iMovie...such levels are still better than Windows Movie Maker.
-The entire soundtrack is comprised of synthesizer hits and a loop of late 80's generic melodies. Imagine 'Dramatic Theme From Magnum, P.I.,' and you have it.
-Finally, the main character rides into the sunset in a Chrysler LeBaron convertible.

I was hoping, foolishly, that Cybernator would provide me with some small glimpse of what people in 1991 thought today would look like. After all, it is almost 2010, the time in which the movie is set. Sadly, Cybernator starts off assuming that the 1990's were the future. It's almost as if this movie was written in the 1970's and nobody got around to filming it until 1991. This confusion, bound to an utter lack of budget, could only lead to a campy sci-fi outing.

So then the question becomes one of pure enjoyment value; can Cybernator be valued in any way? Well, the story makes enough sense that boredom doesn't set in, and the bad parts are funny enough to be mildly entertaining. Overall, however, this movie isn't really worth the time. My main reason for watching it was that I somehow came to own it and had never dropped it in the DVD player. Plus, it had to be better than Hancock.

(Metroid) Compiz-Fusion

One aspect of Ubuntu that grabs your attention is the ability of the OS to be customized. This attribute is apparent in Compiz-Fusion, a theme and desktop effects package for the OS that allows a wide variety of window management and appearance settings to be tailored to the user's preferences. In a PC that has a dedicated graphics card (like mine), enabling and running Compiz-Fusion is relatively straightforward. In addition to providing some great eye candy, Compiz-Fusion improves the speed with which the user (in my case, at least) can move around open directories and applications. The idea is similar to Apple's exposé function, but taken to extremes. For a visual demonstration of these effects in action, take a look at this video. There are still some bugs to work out, like the ability to use custom images as caps for the rotating cube, but overall Compiz-Fusion is a nice package.

First Problem Solved

After installing Ubuntu (which is really easy), it became clear that the first problem to resolve was with flash video playback. Using the recommended Flash Player download (version 9) from Ubuntu's 'Add/Remove' application, videos from websites like YouTube and Hulu were displayed at very low frame rates and were completely unwatchable in full screen. The solution to this situation is to uninstall Flash Player 9 using the Synaptic Package Manager (System-->Administration-->Synaptic Package Manager) and then manually download the Flash Player 10 beta here. Simply run the Flash 10 installer in the terminal and flv videos should run well.

Definitions and Specifications

Before going into detail about the issues associated with getting Ubuntu up and running, it seems appropriate to have a brief background on what Ubuntu is and the computer it is being installed on.

Ubuntu is an open source Linux operating system that is distributed free of charge via the internet. You can download a copy here. The current version, 8.04 Hardy Heron, was released in April 2008. A more detailed discussion of Ubuntu can be found here. Obviously, the big advantage that Ubuntu (and similar Linux operating systems) have over Windows and Mac OS X is the absence of cost in the software; everything is free from top to bottom. This deal comes with a price in the form of user labor. It is often a lengthier process to install and configure programs to perform tasks in Ubuntu than it would be in Windows or OS X. A restricted driver must be downloaded in order to play MP3 files, for instance. Certainly not a deal-breaker, but not the plug-and-play experience that most have come to expect. Couple this level of user involvement with the text heavy, command line fundamentals of the OS, and Ubuntu is an interesting project.

The PC on which Ubuntu is installed is a Pentium 4 HT, 3.0 GHz with 1.2 GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card. The hard drive is an old laptop unit spinning at 5,400 RPM with a capacity of 20 GB. Networking is accomplished via a cheap 802.11g pci card. With luck, no hardware upgrades should be needed to run Ubuntu 8.04 on this hardware.