BookEnz have an innovative range of docking stations for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and PowerBook. Since Macs lack a docking connector, BookEnz have developed docking stations with connectors that plug straight into the external slots present on the notebooks. Kinda cool.
Those who know me know that I love earphones. Not the cheapies that come with digital audio players, but good quality ones that do a decent job of sealing out the surrounding noise. Having first started out with a pair of entry level Shure E2C’s, I moved to something more bassy and am now using the V-MODA Vibes. What you won’t get with the Vibes is audiophile (you know, those who are more equipment geeks than music lovers) level accurate sound reproduction. The sound that these produce is coloured to be pleasurable to the ears and are bass focussed. I have since read about another pair of bass tuned earphones from Future Sonics. The Atrio m8′s are designed to give a coloured sound with heavy bass. It will be interesting to see how they fare against the Vibes.
I found this great little doovey today. It’s a USB SATA disk dock that lets you plug in 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA hard drives, just like a hard drive enclosure, only better.
Available from PC Case Gear for $69 + shipping.
Enough is enough. I’ve delayed upgrading this modest 80 gig hard drive that came with the Macbook for far too long. It’s time for an upgrade! So down I go to the local dodgey computer store, you know the one that looks more like a warehouse than a shop. I picked up a 160 gig drive for $125. Bargain! 5400rpm, 8Mb cache, NCQ. Certainly not the fastest but well worth the price.
Now i’ve been doing Time Machine backups since November last year, so when I got home, I fired up the computer one last time and performed a backup. After it was done, I proceeded shut down the system and removed the battery then the hard drive. Goodbye ol faithful. In went the new drive and back went the battery.
Upon firing up the machine with the external hard drive connected, I stuck in the Leopard install DVD and went through the menus to partition the drive, and then perform a system restore from backup. It asked for the source and then the destination. It then proceeded to restore my files. Everything looked good so far so I walked away and timed the process.
It took about an hour to complete and once finished, asked me to restart the system which I did.
When the system booted back up, you could imagine my astonishment to find everything exactly the way I had left it before the hard drive swap! Everything! From the placement of the icons on my desktop, to the applications I had installed. With the exception that I now had much more space 
This has got to be one of the most painless hard drive upgrades I have ever done. Nice one Apple for making this such a painless process!
by Brandon Yap
Here’s a project I built a few years back now. I wanted to build a UPS for the fun of it, so I did. It turned out to be a very educational experience. It taught me a lot of things about batteries and electricity.
Requirement: A scaleable UPS which is not too expensive and would run for over an hour, ability to add more batteries as required.
Problem: Off the shelf UPS’s are too expensive for the given runtime.
Solution: Purchase commodity parts seperately and build one.
Budget: Under $1000
The Battery
This battery is manufactured by East Penn Manufacturing in Pennsylvania and is part of their Deka range of batteries. It’s got a rating of 19 amp hours and was designed as a sports battery for various type of enthusiast vehicles such as jet ski’s. 19 amp hours means that the battery will last 19 hours if 1 amp is drawn per hour. The cost was $210 from Battery World.
Originally I had wanted a deep cycle battery due to the way the battery was to be used, and that’s being charged then drained in the event of a power failure. Deep cycle batteries are rated for up to 12,000 discharge/recharge cycles. TRUE deep cycle batteries are rare and the only proper deep cycle battery that Battery World stocked was an Oddysey battery. It turns out that a deep cycle battery wasn’t needed after all as normal sealed lead acid (SLA) batteries are capable of around 50 cycles (meaning recharge/discharge cycles). An good example of deep cycle battery use would be solar applications where say a garden lamp would charge during the day and drain every single night.
Say for example that if an average household receives 1 power outage per month that manages to drain the entire battery (which very rarely happens), the little Deka would last you around 4 years. That’s a heck of a lot of protection from a $210 battery. You can also hook up these batteries in parallel to have a crazy amount of excess battery capacity if you’re feeling paranoid. Not only can you power your server and or computer during an outage, but you can cook your dinner and run the portable spa too. Portable SLA batteries and an interverter give you a lot of flexibility for your power needs.
The Power Supply
Sorry about the slightly blurry photo, I forgot to put the camera into macro mode before taking the shot.
The power supply chosen to charge the battery is a 25 amp 3 – 15 volt variable regulated power supply. All batteries have a certain float voltage setting meaning that you can set the charger to the voltage, and leave it connected forever without frying the battery. Every few months tho, it helps to top up the battery with an extra charge of 2.4 volts per cell. The cost is $359 from Jaycar.
The Inverter
Inverters are wonderful toys. They convert DC current to AC enabling you to use any appliance that you’d normally plug into a household AC socket. How long it lasts tho depends on the capacity of your battery. A modest sized kitchen TV i’ve got consumes around 48W. Wattage = Volts x Amps and if my calculations are correct, the battery should last 3.8 hours. The inverter used in this project is rated at 600 watts continuous (1500W surge) and features an efficiency in excess of 85%.
$299 from Jaycar.
Putting the Ghetto UPS together
Now we put all the components together.
The power supply is connected to the wall socket and to the battery in parallel using cables rated for 25 amps. The battery is then connected to the inverter via the supplied alligator clamps (or one day cables for neatness, it’s really looking like Frankstein now!) once again in parallel. Once this is done, you can measure the voltage of the circuit on the power supply readout, and this will tell you the amount of remaining power left in the battery.
The computer was then connected to the inverter via a normal IEC power cable and powered on. Viola! A UPS worthy of Dr Frankstein himself.
This baby will last about 2 hours, and if your power needs grow, hook up more batteries.
Here are pictures of the completed project fully functional.
Post implementation notes: The original Enermax 350W power supply refused to work with the inverter and made it buzz as if it were overloaded. The computer didn’t power on at all. This occured on another computer also with the same model power supply. Switching to a Topower 370W power supply solved the problem. Don’t ask me how because I still can’t explain this.
