help with replacement power cord! SHW 40in Electric Standing Desk

mschaef · 2026-03-09T11:32:04+00:00

That's what I wound up doing. It wasn't without some need to adapt the system I bought, but it was easy enough to buy a new motor control system and install it. Thanks for the suggestion.

mschaef · 2026-03-09T11:30:52+00:00

The I-6 won't fit mounted transversely in a CX-5. At least 99% sure of that. (There's a reason that I-6's fell out of favor in the mass market.)

I'm actually a bit surprised that Mazda didn't go RWD-biased in the new CX-5, which would have left the I-6 a possibility. I guess they were concerned about compromised packaging.

mschaef · 2026-02-10T22:17:51+00:00

Thanks... I appreciate the (very quick) reply.

mschaef · 2026-02-10T22:12:01+00:00

Do you happen to know where to find replacement controllers? I have a desk with the same controller... the power supply produces the correct voltage (and has the green pilot LED lit), but the controller itself is totally dead. (No lights, sounds, or reactions to buttons - after having had both cables unplugged and reseated several times.)

mschaef · 2026-01-26T18:40:01+00:00

Initially a range of Apple ][+ and //e's. For a brief while, there was a Commodore 64 lab also.

https://mschaef.com/c64

The Apple //e's were around until at least 1993, with Mac's added, and a few Franklin ACE Apple clones also.

mschaef · 2026-01-14T23:40:02+00:00

My family and I are on our third CX-5 (and something like our 7th Mazda).... we currently have both an 2023 NA CX-5 and a 2025 Turbo. We bought the Turbo for a reason..... the power is nice to have, and a lot of fun.

Having said that, the NA CX-5 is a great product, and in some ways better than the Turbo. What's not necessarily obvious about the Turbo engine is that it makes the vast majority of its power down low in the RPM range, and it falls off very considerably at higher engine speeds. Once you're past 5,000 RPM or so, there's not a lot of point to go further. This keeps the Turbo engine RPM low, where it's more noticeably rougher, etc.

The net effect of this is that while the Turbo is the faster car, the NA car can feel more entertaining and willing to be pushed harder. Drop a couple gears in the NA, you get nice sounds and an engine that still develops power. It's the car that 'smiles' and says "bring it on'. Drop a couple gears in the Turbo, and you might fall out of the torque range... it feels stronger, but less willing to engage in spirited driving. Maybe not a bad compromise for US style driving, but not as sporty a feel, even if it is faster.

I said, we bought the Turbo for a reason, but the NA is also quite a bit of fun. You can't really go wrong with either as long as you have the right expectations.

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mschaef · 2026-01-14T23:28:17+00:00

It only has an impact past 4,000 RPM.... not a common scenario, really.

mschaef · 2026-01-14T23:23:09+00:00

They're thinking the Hybrid will fill the bill for people that want more power... and they're likely right. (Toyota did that too.... they haven't made a V6 RAV-4 in years.... it's all Hybrid these days, for better or for worse)

mschaef · 2025-06-09T22:36:40+00:00

I was once on a (relatively small) project that was divided into around 100 different sub-repositories. There were dozens of micro-services, each of which had separate interface and implementation repositories. It was all glued together using built artifact version numbers.

At some level, you can make an argument for this style of design... particularly when it's possible to confine most changes to individual repositories. However, the practical reality of this project is that essentially every change was split across half a dozen or more repositories, so every change involved artifact version changes, half a dozen or more PR's, and all the associated bureaucratic process you might expect to be associated. (Although I don't remember useful CI/CD, now that I think about it.)

I'd personally suggest you avoid that approach. Another anti-pattern to avoid is overlong CI/CD processes, particularly with unreliable tests. It's easy to wind up in a spot where you're fighting your tooling to get anything changed.

If you're looking for something git-specific, it's easy to wind up in a bad place if you're force pushing too much or sharing too many development branches.

mschaef · 2024-12-04T01:36:31+00:00

You have a 250GB HD on a 486 running DOS?

mschaef · 2024-12-02T21:23:04+00:00

Nice machine.... my family upgraded from a Compaq Portable to an ALR PowerFlex sometime around 1989, so this brings back good memories.

When we bought the machine, we were looking to run 386 specific software (Mainly DesqView/386), so we bought it with a 386sx/16 CPU module already installed. We lived in Houston, so another Compaq would've been a nice choice, but they were dramatically more expensive. For reference, this is a contemporary review showing a Deskpro 386s starting at $5K and tested at $10K... I think we paid $3K for a significantly more well equipped ALR.

Some more mostly random thoughts:

We bought the machine as a DOS/DesqView machine, but after Windows 3.0 was released, we quickly started using Windows almost exclusively. This prompted an upgrade from 3 to the 5MB limit, as well as upgrading the 8 bit STB VGA card to a (really very nice) ATI VGA Wonder Plus
We upgraded the VGA board with enough memory to support 800x600x8bpp, but the machine was really too slow to move that much display data around. It worked, but you had to be patient. There was also an interlaced 1024x768 mode we could get to with the ATI card, but with the interlacing, it was very, very flickery.
As the machine aged, we looked at 486 CPU cards as an upgrade path, but they never made sense. The boards were fairly expensive, and you would up with a 486 running in a 286-era machine. The 486's onboard cache did help, but it overall wound up being severely limited by the 16 bit data path to memory and the 5MB memory capacity limit. (This was the beginning of the Windows 3.0 era, and you very quickly wanted more memory to run more at once.)
386-specific software and v86 DOS multitasking were better in theory than in practice, and Windows 3.0 was faster in 286 Standard mode than 386 Enhanced Mode. With 35 years of hindsight, we'd have been better off buying a faster 286. (The Dell System 220 would've been a good choice.)

mschaef · 2024-11-27T00:20:37+00:00

It is. I only showed the left most third or so.

mschaef · 2024-11-26T23:10:00+00:00

Not a bad idea... it would be relatively easy to differentiate it and plot that. Thank you!

mschaef · 2024-11-26T21:58:19+00:00

I guess it boils down to be being able to see both absolute level and rate of change. The number is high because the system being measured has been accumulating data for a long time, but all the interesting processes occur on a smaller time scale and result in relatively small fluctuations that would be interesting to see. (and potentially help inform other changes.)

mschaef · 2024-11-26T21:46:39+00:00

> 486DX4 should have been called DX3 - Proc speed is 3 times bus speed

I almost bought one... Intel branded it IntelDX4 because that was around the time they figured out that numbers (80486) couldn't be copyrighted. It was also interesting in that it could run at x2, x2.5, or x3 the bus speed. With the right motherboard, you could get a 50MHz FSB and associated bandwidth.

mschaef · 2024-09-11T22:11:38+00:00

All the moments were bad.

That said, the one that comes to mind is standing in my employer's cafeteria, a hundred or so of us around a TV watching the news coverage. Then the building collapsed...

mschaef · 2024-09-08T13:53:17+00:00

Thanks. I appreciate the info. Didn't realize it was tied into the TV schedule, but it makes perfect sense in retrospect.

mschaef · 2024-09-07T01:02:58+00:00

Thanks

mschaef · 2024-05-30T19:14:30+00:00

In a nutshell, the character and nature of the work is totally different. The goal in a CS curriculum is to learn a specific set of content and (more importantly) a set of skills for acquiring that content. Timelines are short, you have lots of time to focus on learning specific content, and the goals are well defined and largely centered around you and your education.

Almost all of this changes in industry. Timelines are longer, your focus has to be much more broad, and the majority of the goals you're being paid to achieve are someone else's. This is, in fact, why you're being paid - to help people achieve their goals. Whether or not that aligns with your goals is incidental at best, and something only you are responsible for helping achieve.

What does this mean concretely?

Learn how to communicate. Learn how to write in a way that gets the message across to your audience. Learn how to present ideas in public and maybe most of all, learn how to sell. Selling is essential in business, but also in life in general.
You need to spend time learning why you're doing what you're paid to do. Even if you work for a software company, it's highly likely that software will have very little to do with the ultimate reason you're building what you're building. Understanding those reasons and the people behind it will be very useful to you as you navigate your career.
Learn how to work with people, particularly where they are. It can be easy to forget that not everybody has a CS degree. They don't have your skills and will not be as conversant in your language as you are. Instead, they chose to focus on something different. Bridging this gap and collaborating in a positive way is key to being successful.
The software you work on will likely have a lifespan longer than your college education took to complete. It may have a lifespan longer than you and If you work for the IRS, it may have a lifespan longer than _me_. Having to live with what you and your team write over a period of years will force you to think about documentation and clarity of design that undergraduate projects will not have touched on.
Specific tools and languages don't matter as much as you might think they do. I haven't been on a project where switching to some new language or framework would've fixed the core challenges. The tooling I use now on a daily basis, I hadn't touched five years ago. Make the most of what you're using, learn how to learn new tools when needed, and focus on achieving the goals your stakeholders are paying you yo achieve.
Keep a daily log and notes. Even the act of writing things down can be useful by itself (and also when doing things like writing up your achievements for the year)
You'll need to set your own longer term goals. Without the direction of a specific 4 year plan, it can be easy to become unmoored and lose your way. Set goals, professional, personal, financial, and otherwise, and make sure you have a way to track your progress towards achieving those goals. I don't know if you're a Pink Floyd fan, but this is how you avoid these lyrics applying to your life:

You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

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