There are a few DIY stands out there and the one I picked is here.

I wrote this post up originally over on the Something Awful Forums as a guide for others who might be thinking of doing the same.

Overall this was a pretty easy project, and I don’t do a ton of DIY stuff.  I did make some modifications and have further ones in mind, which I’ll go into below.  My biggest gripe has always been trying to figure out how to hold the joystick.  When I was in college (years ago) I had a great setup on my desk at the time (with my great Sidewinder Force Feedback 2, which I still have) but I’ve been unable to find an arrangement that worked for me.  Then this spring I started looking around at sim cockpit pics on the internet and decided I could build one of these pretty easily.  The main reason I picked this one was that it’s pretty easy to move around and I can use an existing office chair instead of doing a full up cockpit (which I might do later on anyway).

For reference all the photos are here in full size.

The plans themselves are very detailed and step by step.  They come with videos but I didn’t even watch them as the PDF was good enough for me.  If you can’t figure out how a certain part of the stand goes together the videos will probably help a lot.

I bought all the supplies at Lowes, along with a few tools I did not have, for around $150.  Any Lowes or Home Depot style store will have everything you need, and if you don’t have the setup at home for cutting boards, they can cut the boards to length for you.  For the PVC pipe I bought 3x 10′ lengths (as recommended) and had plenty left over (about 5′ I think).  This will come into play later.  Here’s a picture of the supplies as I dumped them on my garage floor:

For glue, the PDF recommends Liquid Nails.  Lowes had about 10 different varieties of Liquid Nails and none of them said they worked on PVC or vinyl.  However I saw another brand that specificially mentioned PVC (for bathroom inserts) and it worked out fine.  Unless you’re doing this outside make sure you get glue that doesn’t need venting (it will say on the packaging that it’s safe to use indoors)

First I cut all the PVC pipes to length.  Getting a PVC pipe cutter helps immensely, unless you already have a miter saw or something similar.  I also found it helpful to keep them sorted so I could find the right lengths easily when doing the dry assembly.

After that I did the dry assembly.  There’s 4 or 5 subcomponents that you put together first then assemble the whole thing.  And this is what it looks like when you’re done:

This is where you can start to look at customization.  I’m sorta tall (6′) so I figured the joystick stand would not be long enough (and the PDF mentions this too).  The way it’s designed, you can replace the two long pipes in the stand to make the joystick sit at whatever height you want.  They recommend not gluing these parts down.  The default ones are 10″ and I ended up going up to 17″.  This was actually easier for me to figure out once you have the joystick attached.  You can also vary the width of the whole setup by adjusting a few of the cross members at the bottom.  This is so that it can fit your particular chair or whatever.

The next day I worked on the boards.  This part was pretty easy too, only a few holes to drill and some work with wood screws.

As I mentioned I have both a Logitech G940 and a Saitek X52 Pro, however the Saitek is in storage right now so you just get to see the G940 setup.  Honestly before I bought the boards I should have gotten my G940 out and checked the sizes of the bases (I had it in its box too so I didn’t bother first).  The bases of the throttle and joystick are both bigger than the 6×8″ boards the PDF tells you to cut.  This is only a problem if you want to mount the bases with screws, otherwise you can just velcro the bottoms and this is what I’ve done.

Here you can see the throttle size compared to the board:

And here is the joystick compared to its board.  The length is ok, it’s just wider.

The Logitech pedals fit fine although if you’re short they might be too far off.  The Saitek pedals have a notch in the center which should let you scoot them up closer if the notch is wide enough.  I actually went ahead and mounted my pedals with screws.

At this point I started messing with the joystick stand length.  I had cut the original 10″ pipes and 2 12″ and 2 15″ pipes trying to get a good fit.  At this point I didn’t have enough pipe left to cut longer lengths so I went and bought 2 couplers and attached 2 5″ lengths to the 12″ pipes for a total of 17″.  This brings the joystick up pretty high which is good for me due to how my chair’s armrests are.  This is probably the most user-dependent part of the whole setup and you’ll definitely want to test it out and make sure it feels good for your arrangement.

I’ve attached the joystick and throttle with 2×4″ velcro pads.  This keeps them in one place but lets you scoot them around on the boards for best placement.  In my case I needed to move the throttle to the side a bit as you can see in the photo below.  I might go back and add another board coming back from the current board alongside my left armrest, which will raise up the throttle a little and allow me to bring it back, but for now this is fine.

Here’s the setup under my desk.  Originally I was going to scoot the whole thing under my existing setup (which is to the left out of the photo), but it turns out the length between the sides of my desk is too small for the stand by 1/2 an inch or so so I cannibalized one of my monitors and an older PC I had and went ahead and setup a dedicated flight sim station.

No pics of me using it because my fiance is out of town but it works pretty well.  The instructions have you hooking velcro straps to the side of the stand to keep your chair from rolling away but I haven’t found that necessary yet.  Overall I’m very satisfied and look forward to getting back in the swing of things… I think I’ll probably replay Freespace 2 first

The solution that I finally found in a thread on macthemes2.net from the author was to drop the icons and plist into /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/ manually using ssh.  To do this I had to:

1. Find the *.deb files for the themes and download them manually (the modmyi apt repository is http://apt.modmyi.com/2debs/)

2. Extract the deb files.  Debian archives are Unix ‘ar’ archives, so you do ‘ar vx blah.deb’ which gives you a data.tar.gz file.  Unzip that file to get what you need (the images and plist file).

3. Upload those files to the above directory on the phone and respring.

I discovered that the plist for the theme I wanted to use (Klear) didn’t have the LockInfoImageScale attribute (see http://code.google.com/p/weathericon/), so they were rendered at full size in LockInfo (read: way too big).  I had to edit this in (I used 0.25 as the value) and reuploaded the plist file to my phone and now it looks fine.

In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But… when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.

Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work.

He was also a strong believer in international law:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

I bought a brand new Macbook Pro, 15″, one of the mid 2009 models.  I’m using the 7200 RPM hard drive I bought for my 13″ Macbook, so I already had Windows 7 installed.

Everything works great except I had issues with the audio.  The Macbook, as well as I presume the 2008 Macbook Pros, used a Realtek audio chip.  I installed and reinstalled several versions of the Realtek High Definition Audio drivers from their website on my new Macbook Pro and had no luck.  If you go searching for solutions for this you mostly get people telling you to reinstall Realtek drivers, use “RealtekSetup.exe” from the Leopard install DVD, and so on.  I began to wonder if Apple switched audio chip suppliers, so I started looking at the PCI device.

The PCI ID for the sound chip has vendor id 1014 which comes up as Cirrus Logic.  I then went looking on the Mac OS X Leopard install DVD which has a folder for Boot Camp drivers.  There’s an Audio directory and what do you know, there’s a driver called “CirrusVista64.exe”.  That turned out to be the right driver; I now have a Cirrus Logic CS4206A sound chip in Device Manager.

So apparently Apple has switched sound chips in the 2009 Macbook Pros.  I haven’t seen this ANYWHERE so hopefully this helps out anyone else in my situation.  Now if they’d only fix the trackpad issues…

edit (5 Sept 2009): Since I posted this, new Boot Camp drivers (version 3.0) have been released with Snow Leopard, which have fixed any issues I’ve encountered under Windows XP and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit).  Even right-click on the trackpad is working.

Today we started out by walking to the Lincoln Memorial.  This took us by the Iwo Jima memorial, through part of Arlington National Cemetary, and across the Potomac via the Arlington Memorial Bridge.  This gets you directly behind the Lincoln Memorial.

After checking out the Lincoln Memorial, and getting some pretty nice shots of the National Mall and reflecting pool, we started walking down towards the WWII memorial.  At this point I forgot that we needed to take a side trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but we’ll just catch it another day.

We wandered around the WWII memorial a bit, then headed south through the FDR Memorial Park, along the Tidal Basin, heading for the Jefferson Memorial.

After checking out the Jefferson Memorial we walked up towards the Smithsonian Institute, to get to the metro station nearby.  We took the metro back to Rosslyn, did some shopping and ate at Ruby Tuesday, then headed back to the room.

We did a LOT of walking so that was pretty much it for our day.  Tomorrow’s plan looks like heading to Smithsonian museums, except the National Air and Space Museum, which gets its own day (probably Thursday).

Today’s pictures are in the Day 2 gallery.

We started off the day with… trying to watch a Dream Theater concert in our room.  Great start to a vacation isn’t it?  My brother will have to post with the details, but we were trying to watch DT over the net at some concert in the UK.  Unfortunately, the Internet access here at the hotel is spotty and wasn’t working well with streaming video.  So we ditched the concert and went outside into the blazing sun.

The Iwo Jima memorial is right around the corner so that was our first stop.  It sits roughly at the end of the Theodore Roosevelt bridge and is quite scenic.  The memorial is surrounded by a pretty nice park and it was sunny and warm today so there were lots of people out.

After that we walked south towards Arlington National Cemetery.  On the way there was a nice bell tower donated by the Netherlands government in thanks for being liberated during the Second World War.

We walked into ANC and started making our way towards the JFK memorial and Eternal Flame.  The cemetery is very scenic, lots of trees, and of course many, many gravestones.  There are no joggers, bikes, or cars allowed in most of the cemetery so it was very peaceful compared to the other parts of town we’ve been in so far.

After taking pictures at the JFK memorial we headed over to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Right as we were about to leave there, they started a change of the guard, so we stayed and watched the ceremony.

At this point, I wanted to try and walk to the Air Force Memorial, which just south of the cemetery.  We started heading that way but apparently there are no exits out the south part of the cemetery, so we had to walk back around to the north part.  Eventually we decided we were getting hungry and decided to head back to the hotel.

We ate a late lunch (it was 2-3pm at this point) and then decided to drive over to the USAF memorial.  After 20 minutes or so of trying to figure out exactly what exit and road to take (this place is confusing) we finally got to the memorial’s parking lot.  The Air Force memorial is on a nice little promontory overlooking the Pentagon and DC skyline.  The memorial has very clean lines and is very well put together.  It has lights all over it, so sometime this week I want to head back over at night because I’m sure it is all lit up.

We wrapped up our evening with a trip to the shopping area just north of our hotel in Rosslyn.  This part of the area seems to be rather upper-class, with lots of apartments, condos, and business centers.  A little further west, where we ate last night, seems to be mostly college student area.  Overall it’s pretty nice having supplies within a few blocks.

Tomorrow the plan is to try walking across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which leads straight to the Lincoln Memorial and the west end of the National Mall.  I was actually surprised we were this close to the Mall – I thought we’d have to take the metro to get over there.  There is a very nice metro station a few blocks north of here (Rosslyn) that we will utilize later, but I think that the Mall is close enough that we can just hike over there.  When we want to head to stuff further out we can use the Metro.

All the pictures above (with bigger versions) are in the Day 1 gallery.  Stay tuned for more updates!

We drove over from Dayton today.  The trip wasn’t too bad – the weather was nice and traffic was not too bad until we got close to DC.

I intend to try and write a post per day detailing the things we see and do and including some pictures.  DC posts will be tagged with ‘dctrip2009‘ and I’ll be uploading my pictures to this gallery.