Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’ve got a lot of interesting stuff queued up, but I lack the time to play around with it. But I promise to get to them soon and blog/twitter/flickr/blip.tv all about them:

Chemistry set

I’ve been helping out with the editorial work on Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, so I picked up a basic glassware/lab gear set from Home Science Tools.

Hydra

Andre Lamothe, creator of the Hydra, sent me a Hydra SD Max for review and evaluation. The back story behind this is that I tried, and failed miserably to build one of these after he gave me the prototype Hydra SD to help me demo the Hydra at Maker Faire. I did get enough XP in soldering to level up, but not before ruining my Hydra prototyping card.

Mach 64 Programmable Logic Starter Kit

This is also something Andre sent to me, to evaluate and review for Make. This is the sort of thing I’d fall into for 3 days.

Sun SPOT development kit

Sun sent one of these along to me for evaluation and review. They make Cylon eyes at you when you turn them on. They are full of all sorts of good stuff: Zigbee wireless (can I get it to talk to an XBee?), accelerometer, battery, temp/light sensor. The price may seem steep, but you get two sensor boards and a base station. It’s pretty much ready to roll.

XBee breakout board for the Make Controller

Everything in my house will be talking to everything else very soon now.

There’s much more than that, though: I’ve got so many unbuilt kits, I haven’t hacked the XO in weeks, etc. I’m going to have to hold an open house soon and invite Providence area geeks to help me hack this stuff!

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.

I hope I don’t regret this later:

sqlite> delete from messages
  where mailbox =
    (select ROWID from mailboxes where url = "local:///ARCHIVE06")
  and message_id in
    (select message_id from messages where mailbox =
      (select ROWID from mailboxes
         where url = "imap://bjepson@remote mailbox/ARCHIVE06″));

Make is a sponsor of AS220’s Foo Fest (the successor to AS220’s yearly Fool’s Ball), which is a free block party that takes over Empire Street in Providence, RI from noon to 1am on July 14, 2007.

I’ll be at the Make booth with a bunch of our Make:it Kits, Make:it for Crafters, T-Shirts, boxed sets, and more for sale. I’ll be assembling a few of the kits right there, so if you’re curious about how these things go together, stop by and check out the hot molten lead action!

A while back, I split my MacBook Pro hard drive into three partitions so I could have a small FAT32 partition for sharing files between Windows and Mac OS X. After getting a dedicated Vista system, I wanted to delete the extra partitions I created and get all my disk space back. The only problem is that Boot Camp refuses to work on a disk that is partitioned this way, and the command-line tools are complex. I finally got up enough courage to give them a whirl.

This stuff is tricky, and I expected there was a very good chance I’d make a mistake that would force me to restore from backups. If you decide to give this a try, be careful.

I used SuperDuper to clone my Mac hard drive (in case I screwed up big time) onto an external disk drive, booted into the cloned operating system (your Mac OS X install disc should work too), and got a list of gpt partitions:

$ sudo gpt show rdisk0
gpt show: /dev/rdisk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
    start      size index  contents
        0         1        MBR
        1         1        Pri GPT header
        2        32        Pri GPT table
       34         6
       40    409600     1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
   409640 142270944     2  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
142680584    262144
142942728  10485760     3  GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
153428488  41680896     4  GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
195109384    262151
195371535        32        Sec GPT table
195371567         1        Sec GPT header

To delete the 5GB and 20GB partition, I used this command:

$ sudo gpt remove -i 4 rdisk0
gpt remove: /dev/rdisk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
gpt remove: /dev/rdisk0: 1 partition(s) removed

$ sudo gpt remove -i 3 rdisk0
gpt remove: /dev/rdisk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
gpt remove: /dev/rdisk0: 1 partition(s) removed

Using the original output of gpt, I calculated the disk space I had to work with (10485760+41680896)/2=26083328K and restored my original bootcamp config:

$ sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 72842723328B \
  “MS-DOS FAT32″ Windows 26083328K
Started resizing on disk disk0s2 Macintosh HD
Verifying
Resizing Volume
Adjusting Partitions
Formatting new partitions
Formatting Disk
100% ..
Finished resizing on disk disk0

Then I rebooted from my internal hard drive, used Boot Camp Assistant to restore the Mac to a single partition, and it reclaimed all that disk space.

I recently picked up an XGameStation Pico, which is a small video game system you can build and program yourself. I’m going to be coming up to AS220 around 2:30pm, and I’ll set up a little work area where I can assemble the unit, and if the darn thing works, I’ll even plug it into the projector for some big-screen neo-retro action before the Geek Dinner. Feel free to come along and watch, help, or give me moral support when I mess something up beyond repair!

P.S. If you have a Parallax SX-Key and a KeySpan 19HS USB/Serial adapter, bring it along. Those are the two accessories I forgot to order until last night (and without them, we’ll only be able to run the default video game that’s pre-flashed onto the system).

If you’re going out to the Maker Faire, be sure to drop by the Hacks booth and say howdy. I’ll be bringing some goodies related to a few of our hacks books, and there will be plenty of toys you can mess around with.

vowe dot net: “You
have seen this before: Somebody gives you a PPT file that is huge. When
you look inside you find lots of graphics, most of them in uncompressed
BMP format, some even scaled down…”

Tom
Hoffman points to a cool hack called Vnc2swf. It does exactly what
the name suggests. Be sure to check out the movie on Tom’s page and
the sample movies on the Vnc2Swf page.