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All Aboard!

Published October 15, 2009

I just booked a one-way train trip on Amtrak, from Birmingham, MI to Emeryville, CA. Danielle will fly out a couple days after I arrive, then back just under a week later, with me flying back home a few days after that.

This is going to be an interesting ride. It’s a bit over six hours to Chicago on the Wolverine, a couple hour layover, then another 56 hours or so to Emeryville on the California Zephyr. To Chicago I’ll have a business class seat, and then beyond that I’ll have a private Superliner Roomette.

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Tarkan Akdam’s iFlash iPod Compact Flash Adapter (mk II)

Published October 9, 2009

I use my iPod daily, both in the car and at work for listening to music. I’d also recently come across a nice little PCB made by Tarkan Akdam called the iFlash iPod Compact Flash Adapter (mk II) which allows one to replace the 1.8″ hard drive in their iPod with a CompactFlash card. This card is a very nice, basic design, and can be purchased for a very reasonable price directly from the person who came up with it.

Since the hard drive in my iPod will eventually fail, I wanted to replace with flash before this happened and sell the working disk on eBay. A few months back I’d purchased one of Tarkan’s adapters for £14.50 (US$24.45, at the time) and kept it sitting on the shelf, waiting for a good time to do the replacement. Seeing that a 32GB Kingston CompactFlash card could be purchased for roughly $76.25 from Newegg I figured that now was the time, cashed in some change at a Coinstar machine, and ordered the card. (I was originally going to purchase it with an fee-less Amazon gift card from Coinstar, but the machine couldn’t issue one and thus did fee-less change counting. I then made the purchase from Newegg, who had faster free shipping.)

I’d also considered replacing the battery at the same time, but as I still get great battery life out of my iPod, I couldn’t see the need. Opening the iPod is easy enough, so when the time comes to replace that, I’ll do so.

The 32GB CF card arrived yesterday, and since I’m home watching Danielle as she recovers from having her wisdom teeth removed, I set to work today installing it. Opening the iPod was easily accomplished using one of Danielle’s guitar picks, and after disconnecting the flexible PCB cables and removing two little gray plastic spacers, the compact flash adapter was placed in the iPod frame, where the foam rubber cusions made for a nicely snug fit. After closing the iPod it presented me with a screen indicating that it needed to be connected to a computer for restoration, which puts the OS back on it. After doing so, the flash conversion was complete.

Since there is no longer a need to wait for the disk to spin up, the UI is much more responsive now. Battery life should also be improved greatly, as flash takes less power to run. The only current downside is that the iPod now feels off balance. Previously it’d felt very evenly weighted; solid and firm, but not overly heavy. Now the top of the device, where the battery is, feels a bit heavier than the bottom. Thankfully this shouldn’t matter for me, as most of the time my iPod is sitting on a desk or in a car mount.

Later tonight I’ll post an eBay auction for the old hard drive from the iPod, a Toshiba MK3008GAL 1.8″ 30GB hard disk. I hope that it’ll fetch $20 or $30, to offset the cost of the flash adapter and card. Now, here’s to hoping this iPod has another three years of life left in the rest of it.

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Danielle’s Wisdom Teeth

Published October 9, 2009

Danielle had her wisdom teeth removed this morning and is currently in the living room napping. While all four wisdom teeth were impacted, three were removed intact, which impresses me. In particular I find the one on the right with the twisty root to be neat.

Click here or on the image above to see all the detail, including the yet-to-dry-out pieces of her gingiva.

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New Bike Ideas

Published October 8, 2009

I’ve been wanting a bike for more paved / dirt road uses, but something rugged enough to be banged around as I’m wont to do. For a while I was looking at the Salsa Fargo, but now I’m starting to have other thoughts, steering me towards building up something myself. In particular, I’ve been thinking that a black Surly Karate Monkey frame could do quite nicely with an Shimano Alfine hub and Avid BB7 Road disc brakes. With dirt drop bars and a Jtek Engineering Bar-end Shifter, I think this would be quite the machine for random go-anywhere-but-singletrack rides.

Swapping the bars for a more standard mountain bike bar would even turn it into an interesting, fully rigid off-road device if I wanted to do that. Or, I could even consider something between the two like a On-One Mary Bar or Titec H-Bar or J-Bar, as long as the brake levers chosen work right wtih the shorter pull BB7 Road calipers…

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ATI Radeon 4870 Flashed For Mac Pro (MacPro1,1)

Published October 5, 2009

I’d occasionally been considering picking up a new video card for my Mac Pro (MacPro1,1) to replace my NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, but the new ones are very expensive. Typically there are ways to flash PC video cards with Mac-compatible (OF or EFI) firmware, but reliable methods and card versions aren’t always the easiest to find. However, last week I was looking into it and all the pieces came into place, with good flashing instructions and firmware available and a relatively cheap, compatible card appearing on eBay.

First, I ordered two power cables from ATI, Power Cable for Radeon® X1900 MAC G5 Edition. These cables allow one to get PCIe 6-pin power connectors from the Mac Pro mainboard. Most modern video cards require more power than the slot can provide, so these connectors are generally connected directly to a PC’s power supply to provide the extra needs. As Macs tend not to have extra connectors just hanging around in the case, Apple provided the power connectors right on the main board. These cables thus plug right into the main board (Picture) up near the SATA connectors, then connect right to the back of the video card (Picture).

Next I purchased a Sapphire 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4870 from eBay with a winning bid of $110 (Auction Mirror). This shipped quite quickly, and arrived in great shape with all the original retail box items, which was a pleasant surprise.

After getting the card and the cables, it was time to install it and flash it. To do this I followed Alexandre Boeglin’s article entitled How to flash a PC 4870 for a Mac Pro, using only Mac OS X. I’ll recap the steps that I performed here:

· Acquire the iMac Graphics FW Update 1.0.2 and use Pacifist to extract ATIFacelessFlash.app and ATIROMFlasher.kext from it. This will be used as an OS X native ATI video card flasher for doing the firmware update.
· Acquire the appropriate firmware. I used sapp-512-4870.rom from this MacRumors: Forums post. If you don’t have a 512MB Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 you will likely need to find another or make your own firmware image.
· Remove all the .ROM files in .../ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources and put your .ROM file in there.
· Ensure that ATIROMFlasher.kext will load. The command sudo kextutil -nt ATIROMFlasher.kext is useful for this, and you’ll likely have to do sudo chown -R root:wheel ATIROMFlasher.kext and sudo chmod -R 644 ATIROMFlasher.kext to get it loading.
· Once the .kext is loading and ATIFacelessFlash.app is prepped, shut off the computer, move your old video card up one slot, and install the new one in Slot 1 as shown in this picture.
· Boot the computer with the monitor connected to your old video card. Load the kernel extension for the flashing (sudo kextload ATIROMFlasher.kext), then run the flash utility: sudo open ATIFacelessFlash.app.
· Shut down your computer, pull the old card, and boot up with the monitor connected to the new one. Everything should work great, and you should now have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 for Mac.

After the flashing is done, System Info showed the following under Graphics/Displays:

ATI Radeon HD 4870:
  Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 4870
  Type: GPU
  Bus: PCIe
  Slot: Slot-1
  PCIe Lane Width: x16
  VRAM (Total): 512 MB
  Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
  Device ID: 0x9440
  Revision ID: 0x0000
  ROM Revision: 113-B7710C-176
  EFI Driver Version: 01.00.318

Now that the upgrade is done I can run Google Earth with all the quality settings turned up. I also did a quick compare with two graphics benchmarks, CINEBENCH and OpenMark. With the old card on CINEBENCH I got a score of 3380, and with the new one 5427. Under OpenMark, which seems to test OpenGL, I went from a score of 8520 to 22579.

Having a fan the new card is slightly louder than I’d like, but I was a bit spoiled before with the old fanless card. I’ll try and investigate a way to quiet this one down, but all things said it is still quite quiet. If it ends up being a bit much I can always sell the card with its Mac firmware upgrade for at least as much as I paid.

If you’d like to see a few more pictures, they are all available in this album entitied ATI Radeon HD 4870 in Mac Pro.

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Up and Up and Jittery

Published October 4, 2009

The most recent stage of the cold is an exceedingly runny nose. Danielle experienced this yesterday and purchased the box of Target-brand (up & up) pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, which helped her but kept her from sleeping well last night.

Knowing that this drug makes me feel overstimulated I resisted taking any, but by mid-afternoon when my nose needed to be emptied every five minutes or so, I relented. Since twenty minutes (or so) after injecting the pill I’ve felt twitchy, shaky, and slightly nauseous, the same as if I’d just ingested a few hundred milligrams of caffeine. This is not very much fun, and hopefully it won’t keep me from sleeping, as there’s a bunch of things that I want to get done at work tomorrow.

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New Hooks In Closet

Published October 4, 2009

After yesterday’s wood shaping, some paint, and $24 in hooks my closet has eight new points from which to hang clothing. This all started when Danielle wanted more places to hang hoodies in my closet. Finding a suitable blank space of wall, some spare poplar from work being done around my sister’s house, and suitable hooks at Home Depot I set to work on things.

At $3.99/ea the hooks were a bit pricey, and my can of pure white paint had rusted so I had to buy a new one, but I’m quite content with how it all came out. It fits the space needed and with the hooks screwed into the poplar and the board hanging off of the drywall with toggle bolts it’s quite solid.

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Packetless Routing

Published October 4, 2009

Danielle was wanting some robe-type hooks in my closet for hanging hoodies and such, so I acquired some hooks, a scrap board from my sister’s house, and set to work on them. As just the plain boards looked out of place I threw a simple quarter round on the outer edge. Doing this required fixing my long-broken router, but thankfully the problem wasn’t as complicated as I’d thought. I simply had to clean and reassemble the depth adjustment as it bound on some wood chips and came apart. Yes, it’s a cheap router, but it works.

The boards are currently sitting while a second coat of paint on them dries. Hopefully the third (and maybe fourth) will go on tomorrow morning and the hooks will be up by evening. Maybe with a working router I’ll even keep working on the oak bed project that I’ve put off, partially finished, for seven years.

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Twisted Sheets

Published October 2, 2009

Likely due to the action of the agitator in my washing machine, long pieces of fabric such as the sheets seen above become very twisted and almost rope-like while being washed. They are so tightly twisted that I suspect they actually aren’t getting as clean as they should, and thus I end up washing sheets twice, manually unwrapping them between cycles.

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