LuckyDonkey » Hardware

Microcontroller Demo Scene

dazza — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:31:29 +0000

There is something really fucking cool about making demos and there is something even more cool about making the hardware it runs on as well.

I should point out that I came across this video when reading Make Magazines RSS Feed.

Apple knows interface

dazza — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:10:18 +0000

I added a second DVD drive to my MacPro today. Because I can't make my SuperDrive region free I just plumped for putting a second drive in. Now you may or may not know this but there is no CD eject button on the MacPro (or any apple machine). I have a single key on the keyboard.

So I wondered how I was going to eject the second drive. After installing the drive and rebooting this is what I discovered.

A new menubar tool has appaeared with a familiar eject logo on it. When it's clicked on you see this

So now I can eject the two drives either via the menu option or option-eject it. I'm not sure why it says F12 as I have an eject key on my keyboard. Maybe because it's not an apple keyboard something has gone wrong.

What I love about this is that the interface for all of this is hidden from me when I have one drive. I don't need to know how to eject a second drive when I have one.

This sounds obvious but if you use KDE/Gnome/XWindows/Windows machines you start to feel like there are options for EVERYTHING even if you don't know why they are there. Often they are there and they don't even do anything with no feedback to the user. This where apple excel. Vista, LDE and Gnome all look nice but their vendors don't go as far as Apple to hide meaningless interface options. More choice is not a good thing it's just noise. Sure you tune it out over time but it still takes hidden brain cycles to work with.

I'm not certain of why Apple succeeds where others fail but I can tell you what they do is hard. Any vendor can make a menu, decide on keyboard shortcuts, work with standards groups to decide on a code for eject. But it takes lateral thinking, time and space to be able to sit back and say "You know what: when the user has got one drive, let's hide all the work we've done". Maybe that's the key. If you've spent a few weeks making a menu. You, as an engineer, want the world to see it. You have after all slaved over the details. You have lovingly crafted a piece of code, submitted yourself to code reviews, checkin reviews, standards compliance tests and internationalization reviews. After all that 'they' want to HIDE the menu! Maybe Apple's design isn't driven by engineers. Maybe that's why it works. For once maybe it's not about you but about a greater good?

Wozniak: Keeping the dream alive

dazza — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 23:49:31 +0000

It's really hard to keep the dream alive as you get older. Other priorities like family and friends increasingly take you time and attention. The feeling that nothing is new creeps in. Nothing feels exciting any more. All the adventure of life just disappears. Steve Wozniak seems to have defied these negative forces for the last 50 years. Here is a really interesting and long interview of Woz by Guy Kawasaki

Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.1

dazza — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:12:42 +0000

Apple software update noticed an update this evening. Another firmware update for Intel Macs. I followed the instructions in the installer and all went well. As ever they aren't too clear as to what has been fixed. Something to do with Boot Camp apparently. Anyway, here are the release notes for the update

MacPro, PKR, Parallels, Swiftshader a no go

dazza — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:27:16 +0000

I tried to use the swiftshader demo DLL's to get PKR to run on my MacPro with Parallels and Windows2000. I put the demo DLL's in the c:/program files/pkr folder, renamed the d3d9.dll in c:/winnt/system32 folder and ran PKR. It downloaded all the data but crashed while starting the app. I didn't even get to see the main window

There doesn't appear to be anything in the .ini file I can edit to make it more likely it will run.

TBH though none of the examples ran either Maybe there is something wrong with my DX installation. Shame you can't uninstall DX isnt it!

Update: I got it working with VMWare

MacPro: Slow SATA Drives

dazza — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:05:55 +0000

This is a better link to how to create an XP Disc with the required SATA drivers

MacPro: Slow drive access

dazza — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 23:09:39 +0000

I does seem that despite my initial thoughts drive access is compromised if your running WindowsXP on a MacPro with Bootcamp.

This page has great detail on how to get around this.

Silence is Golden?

dazza — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 09:17:03 +0000

One of the GREAT things about the MacPro is that it is nearly silent. It's sitting right next to my feet. I can't feel any vibrations and I can't hear any fans. I've spent a lot of money trying to get my PC's to this magical place.

One of the downsides is that installation is more difficult. When installing XPHome I couldn't hear what was going on. Normally there is a dialog between the installer and installee. You curse and it responds with clicks of the harddrive, whirs of fans, blinks from LEDs and odd scraping sounds from the floppy disk. With the MacPro there is NOTHING. No dialog. It's a one way street. I'm used to this from a Mac. I'm not used to them being this quiet but Im used to there being no lights or floppy crunches. Windows installation seems hollow without the feedback.

BootCamp1.1Beta – Third Attempt

dazza — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:55:30 +0000

OK, so now I know I cant just format the drive I started again from scratch. I used BootCamp1.1Beta to remove the XPHome partition (needed a reboot grrr). Then I stated again from scratch.

When XPHome was installed and it went into a 'finding hardware' frenzy I sat back and let it settle down. Then I used the drivers disk, installed things and it all went fine(ish).

I still cant get my two video cards to work. There are a lot of devices in the DeviceManager that have exclamation marks next to them and I dont know how to fix this. XPHome only supports two processors as well. So Im not really getting the best out of my MacPro by running windows. Maybe Vista will be be flexible. Im not going to shell out for Windows Server!
I wonder what a 'Base System Device' is? Im assuming the PCI Express ports not working are stopping my second graphics card from being picked up. Im not really sure where to go from here but it is working well enough now for me to play BattleField 2 and PKR on it. A few people on the forums have made comments about drive speed but I didn't notice any problems.
Another disappointment for me is that I can't run Parallels using this hard drive. I need to create a new VM image with a new install of Windows. Im not sure I care enough to do that. This is a shame though.

Still At least I get a choice now. If you hold down the option key while the Mac is booting you see this

Pick an OS and off you go. Schweet.

BootCamp1.1Beta – second attempt

dazza — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:19:53 +0000

The first attempt to install XPHome with BootCamp1.1Beta on my MacPro was a partial success. So I tried again. I wanted to use FAT32 this time so I could read/write the partition from OSX.

I'm afraid attempt two was a complete failure! Windows copied all of its files to the hard disk, rebooted and instantly said 'Missing file /system32/hal.dll'.

I of course exploded into a fit of swearing! Its not even installed itself yet... it's mearly copied its installation files to my harddrive! How can this go wrong!

Third time a charm!

Update:

Well it seems from this thread that if you reformat the drive with windows on it it wont work any more. You NEED to remove the partition first from within BootCamp1.1Beta and THEN recreate the partition followed by reinstalling via BootCamp1.1Beta. I can see why this software is beta. There I was thinking it was beta because of windows