dsz123

What's been on my mind lately? Read on...

I took one more picture of the kludged cable from my iMac hack – this time with the good digital camera. Check it out:

So a good portion of the city of Boston moves in or out of their apartment on September 1st (any guesses on what percent of the city turns over?), leaving behind them a wake of trash and assorted abandoned goodies. One of my favorite September 1st activities (when I’m not moving myself) is to bike around and check out the freebies left on the sidewalk. Past hunts have yielded such treasures as houseplants, pots, tools, etc.

My brother and I went digging around on Monday night and discovered… drum roll please… a car roof rack! Not a cheapie one, either, but a genuine Thule rack, including a piece to mount a bike up there, as well as carry several sets of skis. The only thing missing is the set of feet to attach the rack to the car (and even if we’d found them, it’s unlikely that they would’ve fit my car since they’re matched to the roof shape). The rack and accessories are worth about $200 new, according to the website.

We were about a mile and a half away from my house when we found the rack, and only had the bikes for transportation. Rather than risk someone else finding it while we went back for a car (or waste the time having one of us sit around waiting for the other to come back with a car), we managed to strap the three hefty beams to my bike using only two bungee cords, and I managed to bike home without taking a spill. Check it out:

It’s hard to see, but there are two beams strapped to the bike just under the basket and a third sticking up out of the basket
Roof rack strapped to bicycle

Here’s the rack disassembled in my garage
Roof rack in pieces

I’m heading off this evening to the bike store to see about buying the feet and gettin’ the rack all set up.

posted September 3, 2003 – 7:09 am

As previously mentioned, my iMac (graphite DV SE) has been having issues – specifically, the hard drive has been making bad noises of the “imminent mechanical failure” variety. Rather than replacing the whole computer, I decided I’d buy a new hard drive (cheap!), copy the data from old to new, and go on my merry way.

So, at this point, I open up my computer (decent instructions here) and look for a way to hook up both hard drives at once. For some reason, I had thought there were two hard drive bays inside the computer, but alas there was only one (so I would have to leave the case open while both drives were hooked up). It turned out that that was the least of my problems.

My iMac came with two internal drives – a DVD/CD drive and a 13 GB hard drive. Now, I figured I could just unplug the DVD drive, plug in the new hard drive and copy away. Unfortunately, the connector to the DVD drive is a different one than my new hard drive needed (the DVD drive gets its power from the cable, so there are ten extra pins on one end making the plug too big for the hard drive), so there was only one appropriate plug on that cable for a hard drive. The new hard drive came with an IDE cable that has three plugs – one goes to the motherboard, the other two go to the devices you’re hooking up (in my case, the old and new hard drives). Unfortunately, the plug on my motherboard wasn’t the right shape (it has fifty pins and the IDE cable has only forty). Stuck!

Rather than chopping up either the IDE plug or motherboard socket, I decided to join up the two cables that I had. After checking with CompUSA to see if they had an adapter (they said “No, but we can copy your hard drive over for only fifty bucks.” – gee, thanks a lot), I decided to make one. I got out the wire strippers and solid-core wire and came up with a pretty ugly hack. But it worked!

Making this even more ghetto than necessary, I had lent out my digital camera, so the only way to take pictures was with my Lego Mindstorms Vision Command camera and a capture utility. Sorry for the dark and blurry pics. Check ’em out:

If you look closely, you can see the 40 wires bent into bracket shapes (like this: [ ):
Grossest. Hack. Ever.

Because the iMac (on the right) was upside down, I used another monitor (on the left)so I could navigate without going crazy. You can see the two hard drives on top of the iMac. Probably not a great idea to have them right on top of each other, but it worked.
Grossest. Hack. Ever.

Once I got the two drives hooked up, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a perfect copy of my old drive on the new one. If you ever want to do this sort of thing (schlep all the data from one drive to another) on a Mac, I can’t recommend CCC highly enough. It was easy to use and completely painless. I had no problems booting up with the new hard drive, and all my data, settings, profiles, etc. transferred over seamlessly.

It was definitely a satisfying solution to a frustrating problem, but really I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. There must’ve been a better way – anyone know it?

posted August 29, 2003 – 7:22 am

I decided against playing frisbee this fall, and instead opted to sign up for a pretty intensive woodworking class (I’m taking “Fundamentals of Fine Woodworking”). I’m excited!

posted August 27, 2003 – 8:25 am

My bedside table is nearly finished – the only bit left is to make a nice face for the drawer. I’ll post pictures soon…

I’ve had to hold off on buying a new computer for a bit, so I’m using an old (and pretty junky) laptop to surf at home as my iMac’s still not happy. It’s definitely made me use the internet less at home in the past week, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing at all.

In case you were wondering, this guy‘s one of my heroes.

posted August 26, 2003 – 6:42 am

My poor iMac is on the fritz. The hard drive is slowly dying, and I spent a good couple of hours yesterday slowly transferring my data off it. It’s served me well for a number of years, but I think it may be time for a new computer.

Apple shouldn’t be hurt, but I may switch back to PC’s as the design program I use most often – SolidWorks – doesn’t run on anything but Windows. It’s been a nice five years with MacOS, and I’ll miss the simplicity and the “it just works” factor. Any recommendations for a good PC to buy?

posted August 18, 2003 – 7:01 am