Our water collection tray (made of cardboard) got wet and collapsed. So we improvised with black plastic!
There is a fan in another room exhausting air. Cold air comes straight into the living room!
Download my script to automate rdiff-backup installation on OS X.
I use rdiff-backup to keep all my systems backed up. Rdiff-backup keeps incremental changes and permission information, and only transmits changes over the network. It’s great for automated remote backups. All my Linux systems backup at least once a night, some several times daily to offsite locations via consumer-class internet connections. The first backup is painful if you have a lot of data, but after that only differences have to go so things are pretty smooth. (more…)
Because I have daily need for both Linux and Windows XP, I set out to get these operating systems running on my MacBook Pro in addition to OS X 10.5 Leopard. I attempted this feat previously with 10.4 Tiger and had more trouble than I decided the project was worth.
Fortunately the process seems to have been simplified greatly by Apple with Leopard. This post on the Ubuntu Forums by violajack covers the method I’m currently attempting:
Easiest triple boot ever. Leopard, Gutsy, Vista
I just spent the day trying to set up a triple boot via various guides out there and found that there is an easier way, especially for those who don’t want to partition from the command line.This is on a C2D Macbook.
I started from a clean install of Leopard on the whole disk. Then I installed rEFIt, since I wanted to make sure that would work. It didn’t work from the installer, and I did have to venture into the terminal to fix it with the manual install commands:
cd /efi/refit
./enable.shThen I used Bootcamp Assistant to set up a 30G partition for Vista. This is the one step that most guides tell you not to do, they all say you have to partition from the terminal using diskutil resizeVolume. I just kept toasting my partition maps with that thing, and when I did get it right, the windows installer would complain and refuse to proceed. Going straight from bootcamp was the only way I could get the windows install to cooperate.
I completely installed Vista leaving me with OSX and Vista via plain old normal bootcamp. Bootcamp changes your startup volume, so I had to hold Alt to get the option to boot into OSX again. I reran the rEFIt enable.sh, but I’m not sure if that was really necessary. I had to then change the startup volume back to the mac partition, which allowed it to boot into rEFIt again.
From OSX, I used the GUI Disk Utility from the Utilities folder. If you click on the main disk (not on of the two partitions) you will have a tab option for Partition. From the graphic of the two partitions, click the main OSX partition, then click the little plus sign and it will split the OSX partition into two. You can then drag the space between to set the size of the new partition and name it whatever you want. Disk Utility will only format it as HFS+, but the Ubuntu live CD will gladly reformat it to ext3 for you. The partitions did not stay proportional size-wise in the GUI, but if you click on each, it should show the correct size in GB. Yes, it resized my OSX partition, while booted, nondestructively, without breaking my ability to boot Windows.
From there, I inserted the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD and restarted. rEFIt came up and I chose the option to boot to the Linux CD. I reformatted the new HFS partition as ext3 using the Partitioning tool, but I think it would have worked from in the installer as well. I ran the installer as normal, choosing to partition manually. It wanted to format the ext3 partition again to use it as root, so I let it. It complained about not getting a swap partition, but that’s normal. The only thing to be careful of at this point is that in the last window of the installer, you have to click the “Advanced” button and tell it to install grub to the same partition as Linux, not hd0, or it will overwrite the Master Boot Record. In my case (EFI system on 1, OSX on 2, Linux on 3, and Vista on 4) that meant installing to /dev/sda3.
When that finished, I rebooted and hoped for the best. rEFIt came up with three entries! I have been able to boot all three OSes now just fine, with no partitioning from command line!
I hope this can help others out there looking for an easy way to cram all three OSes on a mac.
If I succeed I’ll update this post. It will be great to have KDE running natively again… how I’ve missed that!
Oh yeah, it’s so weird to see Windows XP booting on a Mac the first few times. It seems so wrong, somehow…
UPDATE: It worked! Following these instructions works to get Gentoo, Windows XP, and Mac OS X 10.5.1 running on my MacBook Pro!
So far the project has been going quite well. Yesterday I finished the first driver board, of which we’ll need one per display. The board has 16 relays, 16 transistors, 16 LEDs, and two octal transparent latches. With a 16 pin header this board will connect to a breakout board that performs address decoding for the latch enable signals on each latch.
Jon is working on assembling the breakout/decoding board, which is responsible for isolating the parallel port with closed-collector transistors on each of the twelve TTL logic signals we’re using, and decoding the four control lines into latch enables for all the display latches.
The interface design is fairly simple… the eight data lines are routed to each of the octal latch’s D inputs, and the four control signals are decoded into 16 active high signals, each routed to a latch enable input on a particular octal latch. The software is responsible for assigning the control bits to select a latch, then outputting data to be stored. Consequently the relays will open or close depending on the data bits set. This turns on or off individual segments in a given display.
To date I’ve written some software to test and debug the decoding circuit but nothing to really drive the display. Once that is done I’ll post the code. Hooray for Thanksgiving break!
Stay tuned for more updates and schematics/code.
At last the first driver board for our 16 segment display project is complete! I’ve been working on it for quite a while. Most of today, actually. Here’s a few pictures (also added to the gallery):
Here’s the prototype for the data bus multiplexing system to run the sixteen segment displays.
We’ve decided to build four sixteen-segment displays, each 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, composed of 800 twinkle Christmas lights each. The project will be documented incrementally, so check back often. The displays are made from eight 2×3 boards. Each display is divided into sixteen segments to allow for better creation of each letter that scrolls across. This has been our most time consuming project so far. Expectations are high, and so far it has exceeded them. More pictures soon!
For now, see the gallery.
Well here it is, the final incarnation of the 8051-based thermostat.
