pyramid scheme

in my infinite quest to find the perfect laptop, i read up on ibm's new light and thin laptop, the thinkpad x40. on friday i looked at cdw.com and they had the model i wanted in stock, so i ordered it along with a usb floppy drive. i drove out to pick it up, and upon returning to work, i was excited to see that it was very openbsd compatible with no tweaking. apm (suspend and resume), sound, x11, and even the hardware volume buttons worked. the nipple-style (as opposed to a trackpad) pointer is taking some getting used to. the third/middle mouse button is nice for quick pasting operations in x. the x40 is much smaller and lighter than the powerbook, and now that i use ratpoison, i don't have a need for a massive screen. two xterms side by side on the 1024x768 screen are each 82 characters wide, 2 more than i even need. excellent.

over the weekend i've been hacking up rick wash's netbsd tcpa driver to support the ibm security chip onboard and made a port of the tcpa userland tools. the driver attaches:

tcpa0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel 82801DBM LPC" rev 0x01 at 0x400 (Intel ICH2 LPC), version 1.1.0.6, vendor ATML

and the tcpa_demo can pull info from the chip through /dev/tpm, but then it hangs for some reason. i have no use for the chip and i'm not even really that sure what it even does, but it's giving me something to do and maybe it can eventually do something useful.

%a4, car i spent most of the weekend working on the car, installing the spp electric fan kit i bought from matt a long time ago and the evo fmic. i spent saturday afternoon and evening taking the bumper, ac condenser, radiator, and the smic out. i read online that to get the stock fan off, a big open-ended wrench was needed which i didn't have, so i figured i'd retire for the night. the a4 forum said otherwise, so sunday morning i figured out how to get it off, put the new efk in, the radiator and ac condenser back on, then got to work on the fmic. there were no instructions with it but it was pretty easy to figure out. since the t28 is bigger than the stock k03 turbo, though, and i had to trim the stock hose coming out of it, the new passenger side intercooler pipe was angled slightly odd and pushed down a bit. this made it hard to get the bpv attached to the new pipe and is going to conflict with the bumper a tad.

after everything was installed and put back together, i couldn't drive the car because the driver's side intercooler pipe has a hole in it where the boost sensor is supposed to attach. since i have a non-dbw, i have no boost sensor, so i had nothing to plug it up with. i fiddled with the bumper a bit to see if it would easily go back on but it didn't look like it would. in doing so, the headlight washer kept dripping and since i've had problems with it forever, i just took the whole damn system out. i cut the line and plugged it, then removed all of the tubing.

i was anxious to see if everything worked, especially the efk since if it didn't, it'd mean i'd have to drain the coolant again and take everything apart. i taped up the boost sensor hole and started it. it ran kind of odd, but the fan ran ok. i glanced up at the coolant reservoir and realized i forgot to put the cap back on. duh, no pressure. i quickly shut the car off and put the cap back on, then started it again... much better. i backed it out and took a slow drive down the street without the bumper. sounded weird because of the wind hitting all of the exposed pieces in front like the horns and washer fluid tank, but drove ok. because the ic pipe was just taped shut, i couldn't push any boost through it.

dave is scheming up something to seal the pipe shut, and i'm hacking away at the bumper with my trusty dremel. everything should be ready tomorrow.