Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to my desk to find my Mac frozen. When I rebooted, the hard drive started making horrible noises, so there was no question that my 200GB Hitachi drive had crapped out. Fortunately, Time Machine had my back, and the good news is that I dusted off the 250GB HM250JI Samsung drive I had written off a while back. I had installed it in my MacBook, but it was slow to the point of being unusable. And as it turns out, this was a bug. I wouldn’t have known this if my hard drive hadn’t crashed, because I’d been using the 250GB drive in an external enclosure, where it behaved fine, if a little slow. Well, one firmware update later, and this drive is zipping along. It’s not a blazing speed demon, but it’s in the sweet spot for performance/capacity that I had hoped for when I bought it!

I was planning to make a MiniPOV Cylon Jack-O-Lantern, but I remembered I didn’t have a MiniPOV at home. I placed an order for one to remedy this, but I figured the order wouldn’t get here in time for Halloween, so I whipped something else up instead. It’s a Jack-O-Lantern that’s designed to look like it’s got a flickering candle in it… until you get up close. It has a proximity sensor and brings the LEDs up to maximum brightness as soon as you get near it. The source code is based on an example from Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which I now keep on my bench within reach of all my Arduino boards. I wrote up an Instructable that shows how to do it. Now I need to figure out what to put the electronics in for the next holiday. I think stuffing it in a turkey could be a remarkably bad idea.