Notebooks of Scott

Some of my christmas money went towards purchasing a Monochron Clock kit from Adafruit.com.

It turned out to be an awesome build and I had lots of fun putting it together. I also chose it because it allows you to program your own clock “faces” for it. I’ve programmed a Space themed face for it that simulates the space station ground track. I’ve also programmed an autodim feature for the backlight because my preferred daylight brightness was too bright at night. The fact that I can customize it to fit my needs is an awesome thing. I wish there were more products like it.

I did encounter one problem when building the kit; the processor chip wasn’t working. However, Adafruit provides a forum on their website for support and they very promptly helped me isolate the problem and replaced the chip. The customer service is excellent.

My firmware for the SpaceChron clock face can be found at https://github.com/samckittrick/Scotts_Clocks/tree/SpaceChron

A video of the clock working is at http://youtu.be/YPtyn8xhsz4

Shortly after I purchased my Kindle Keyboard, I decided to jailbreak it and apply the screensaver hack. Now I can have an infinite variety of interesting screensavers. I also have access to quite a few interesting hacks for the device.

Where I got the jailbreak files from: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for_all_2.x_and_3.x_Kindles

A list of hacks available for the Kindle: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704

So a couple months ago, my girlfriend accidentally dropped her laptop and corrupted the software to the point where it could no longer boot. The computer has a bios password that she didn’t know and so I couldn’t even get it to boot off a CD. So in order to recover her data so that it could be put on her new computer, I pulled the hard drive and attached it to my Linux computer. The response: The Click of Death. That sound a hard drive makes when something is totally out of place and it doesn’t want to work anymore.

I fiddled with it for quite a bit, and was about to throw my hands up in disgust when I remembered a last resort trick I had read on Lifehacker a while back; toss the hard drive in the freezer for a couple of hours and then try running it. The idea is that the cold might put things back in place. However, its a dangerous thing to do as it could very easily kill the drive; but if the drive isn’t working anyways, its can’t hurt to try. So I put the drive on top of the bucket of ice cream in my freezer and took a shower. When I came back I pulled it out and tried again. The platters wouldn’t spin up at first but once they thawed, they started spinning and ran without any major bouts of the Click of Death for the entire seven hours it took me to back up the data. It may still spin up again if I were to try it but I couldn’t say for sure since I managed to get all the data in one go.

So as a last resort, this trick does seem to work in some cases.

Save a Failed Hard Drive in Your Freezer

“Some Folks at Google” have created a small website to help people understand what a web browser is and to help them find one that works best for them. The site has a short video plus some tips and tricks and links to 5 major browsers. Check it out: WhatBrowser.org

The MIT Museum is hosting an exhibit called “Metropath(ologies)”, exploring the modern world of communication around us. Part of that exhibit is a webapp that focuses on data mining and the building of profiles based on information mined by computer programs. It searches the web for your name using a sophisticated computer algorithm and then attempts to show who you are based on the results. It is quite interesting.

Link: Personas|Metropath(ologies)

My persona can be found on Flickr or by searching for “Scott McKittrick” on the above website.

For a while I have been using the Blogger service to hold my blog. I started the blog before I started my website and then simply used it after I had set up scottmckittrick.com. Now, however, I have decided to keep the service hosted with my website. So I have created a new subdomain, http://blog.scottmckittrick.com to hold it and set it up under WordPress. So far I am very impressed with the program and am glad I switched. I will be working on a custom theme for my blog to go with a new theme I am working on for the main website. Check back soon for updates.

One of the things that I love about the internet is the wide range of information that is available. The only problem is that it is also widely spread, and I am too lazy to looking for it myself. So I have been trying to find a way to create a dashboard on my computer that didn’t require my going to a website to see it (a la Netvibes or PageFlakes). It has taken me a while, but I recently noticed that Google Desktop allows its Gadgets to be placed anywhere on your desktop. Viola! Instant dashboard. On top of that, it is right there when I turn on my computer.

I am seriously considering trying Yahoo! Widgets and Adobe Air as well. Just for comparisons sake.

Update: I tried out Yahoo! Widgets. It is by far a more aesthetically pleasing set up. However, I could not find an RSS reader that could parse anything but perfect XML, and there are few perfect XML files. So until I can find one that does so, I’ll stick with Google Desktop. Interestingly enough, neither Google nor Yahoo have created an RSS reader widget for their programs. I would have thought an RSS reader would have been the first thing to create.