For Christmas, Oona got me a the Millennium Falcon™ LEGO Set (7965), an excellent gift.  Before I even finished building it, I noticed that it came with a blue plastic tube, and something told me it needed to be lit. 

I had some Adafruit El Wire laying around, and tried running it through.  It looked excellent, and immediately the little one, who also got one for Christmas, wanted me to wire hers up as well.  While it looked nice, it had some serious drawbacks:

• The power inverter makes a high pitched whine.
• The battery pack + inverter are quite large and hard to conceal.
• The inverter takes 2 AA batteries and puts out 110VAC at about 2000hz, which is not exactly safe for kids.
• Over all it is a bit pricy with the inverter/battery pack starting at $7.50, and the El Wire is about $1.45/ft.

I also had some Light Pipe laying around that I purchased from Spark Fun a while back on whim, figuring it might be useful some day.  I tried popping a white LED into the LEGO that holds the blue tube in place, and putting some Lite Pipe inside of the blue tubing.  It looked good, but not as brilliant as the El Wire.  Putting LEDs on both sides helped a lot, but was not as blue as the EL Wire.

In order to get a better color I ordered some 3MM Blue LEDs from Jameco Electronics.  I also ordered a few 3xAAA battery holders with built in cover and switch to use in powering the LEDs.  I had located a small area at the bottom of the Millennium Falcon where I could hide the battery box so I attached an unused LEGO plate to the box with some double sided tape so that it could easily be attached.

After some soldering and heat shrink tubing I was able to test the LEDs with the Light Pipe and attach it to the bottom of the Millennium Falcon:



The finished project looks like:



In the end, the combination of 2 blue LEDs and the Light Pipe looked just as good, if not a little bit brighter than the El Wire version.  The project cost about $5.00:

• $0.58 - 2x 3MM blue LEDs @ .29ea (In pack of 10)
• $0.95 - Battery box with cover and switch
• $1.98 - 6" of Light Pipe (From a $3.95 1' length)
• $1.16 - 2 pieces of heat-shrink tubing from Radio Shack
• $0.11 - About 6" of 2-Conductor Intercom Wire

I am giving this one to the little one so she can light the Millennium Falcon she has at her dads place and will be making another one for me. For this next version I am going to attempt to run the wires through the LEGO pieces under the body, in order to hide the wires better, and I may also run some wire to the front of the ship in order to light the headlights.

I will try to take more photos of the construction, if I remember... :)

Tags: electronics, hobbies, led, lego, toys
Current Location: United States, California, Berkeley
Feeling: accomplished

I recently got a 27" iMac to replace my 3 year old PC laptop.  So far the experience has been good, although I am still finding a few annoyances with the UI compared to Windows or even Gnome, but I am mostly happy with the experience.  So far the biggest win is that iTunes now starts in less than 10 seconds compared to the laptop where it could take MINUTES for it to start, and it hardly ever crashes anymore.

I figure that should start posting solutions to problems I have had during this migration, and ones I have yet to resolve in the hopes of helping others and finding needed or alternative solutions.

As part of this upgrade, and based on my experiences with reading mail on the iPhone, I also gave up Pine in favor of Mail.app.  This took some doing, and also required me to make some changes to how I save mail. 

One of my favorite features of Pine, and one that kept me using it for years, was the ability to set an FCC address for entries in the address book.  Once an FCC address was sent, not only would mail to that person/company be filed to a specific folder, anytime I hit "s" (Save) while viewing a message from that person/company, it would also be filed to the designated folder.  If the person/company was not in my address book, the mail would get filed to the default read mail folder. 

This allowed the flexibility of using something like procmail, while still having an in your face Inbox.  I often prefer to have mail land in my Inbox, than to other folders I may check less frequently.  Within a year, I would end up with an 'Accounts' folder that had at least 100 sub-folders, of different companies I deal with or who send me email.  After archiving a years mail, Pine would always recreate the folders as needed.  Finding email

Once I started using the iPhone as my primary email client, continuing to file may this way became very tedious.  I would often read the mail on the iPhone, then file it later in Pine.  As time went on, I started to wonder if bothering to file the bulk of my mail in specific folders was even worth it anymore.  It made finding all correspondence from a person/company easy, even when they used multiple addresses, but modern (read: Not Outlook) mail readers make it very easy to search mail, or set up smart folders based on search criteria.

Much like my switch to iTunes, the search box at the top right of the application is what has sold me on using it, and no longer needing to file my mail so carefully. I keep the last few years of my email online, yet Mail.app has no problem searching it fast, using what I assume is a local index to speed up the searching.

One annoyance on the iPhone and in Mail.app is the lack of an easy way to file an email that has been read to something like a "READ MAIL" folder.  Sure you can click the file icon, and select the folder, but I was looking for something more convenient, that could take place in one keystroke/action.

On the iPhone this was very easy.  Since I never delete mail, just pointed the Deleted Mailbox to my "READ" folder, and turned off the removal of deleted messages and the ask before deleting prompt.   Now I can blow through my Inbox every morning, tapping delete for each email.  These settings can be found in the settings application under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" -> Accounts -> a particular account -> Advanced.

In Mail.app on OS X this was a bit more difficult.  I can either drag mail to READ, or repeat that action with ALT-OPTION-T.  I am not fond of either option, and the desktop version does not have the same flexible options to change where deleted mail is stored as the iPhone does.

My solution was a cron job that moves mail from 'Deleted Messages' to 'READ' every hour.  I already have a cron job that reads any mail filed as Learn-SPAM or Learn-HAM and uses it to train Spam Assassin, so adding this was no big deal.  I figured that if I was going to be moving mail that I knew was read, and was not SPAM, I might as well train Spam Assassin with this mail while moving it as well.  Any mail I read, and 'delete' are now used as samples of HAM (Not SPAM).  Anytime junkmail ends up finding its way to my Inbox (rare) I just file it as Learn-SPAM instead of deleting it. 

EDIT TO ADD: mkb_cbr points out that Mail.app on OS X DOES have the flexibility to change where deleted mail is stored.  My mistake was looking in the Preferences -> Accounts tab, and selecting the advanced options for the mail server.  The solution is to select the mail folder you want to use for Trash, then select Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For -> Trash. 

Like with most issues I have experienced on the Mac, things are not always where I might expect them to be, or where I would consider to be the most logical place.  Often times it is too user friendly for my own good.  I guess I just don't Think Different.

My gut instinct says to NOT use this option, and continue using my cron job solution in the off chance that a future update to Mail.app changes my default settings and decides to be helpful and empty my Trash.  In fact, now that I have this cron job set up, I am also changing the settings on my iPhone as well.  

Tags: apple, email, iphone, mac, mail, os x, spam
Current Location: Oakland, CA

20 years ago today I was living in Oakland, across from Highland Hospital. 

One day my friends Stephanie and Linda wanted to do some shopping and we headed over to Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo.  I forget the reasons why we went all the Way to San Mateo to do shopping, or what particular store we were headed to.  Our plans were to do some shopping, then head back to Oakland.  I took the San Mateo bridge to get there, and had planned to head back on the Bay Bridge.  If we had been on time, we would have been heading back at around 5PM.

We were having a fun day when suddenly, the mall started to shake.  We were experiencing an earth quake, and it felt like a pretty large one.  I remember people started frantically running out of the mall.  My friends and I were pretty close to an exit, but I had no desire to leave the mall.  We were pretty close to an escalator, and I recall moving us towards it, and stood under it, thinking it was the safest place to be.  I glanced outside and could see stucco falling onto the side walk, so I knew that was NOT where I wanted to be.  The escalator we were standing under was near the poster/print shop.  I recall it having a two story glass window, and it was starting to flex pretty badly.  I had never seen glass move so much, and it was quite fun to watch, but the window never broke.

After the mall stopped shaking we made our way to the parking lot.  I had parked on the upper level.  Not to many other cars were up there.  The first thing I noticed was that my car was no longer in between the lines of the parking space, but had moved over a bit.

Having grown up in the Bay Area, earth quakes did not phase me.  I had lived through quite a few, and I did not understand people who let a little ground shaking scare them.  From the moment the ground started shaking, to seeing the stucco falling, to seeing that my car was moved a bit, I was very calm.    This is one of the things I remember most..  I remember  thinking that most of the people in the mall were acting quite silly, running outside the way they were.  Even one of the people I was with wanted to go outside during the shaking, and I recall having to stop them, for their own safety.

At this point I figured that the roads would be very chaotic, and that the best thing we could do was to wait it about a bit, listen to the radio, and then head to my moms place to make sure everything was OK there.  She lived in San Mateo, not too far from the mall.

We got into the car and turned on the radio.  The radio was tuned to my favorite radio station of the time, and I was slightly surprised to hear news, and not music when I turned the power on.  We first heard the magnitude of the quake, and I recall acknowledging with a laugh that it was quite close to what I had predicted earlier.  The news continued with a report that 'the bay bridge had fallen', or at least that is what we heard.  It was most likely an early report, and it was a bit vague, but we heard that something major happened to the Bay Bridge.

This is where I stopped being calm.  If something could happen to such a large structure that I had driven on countless times, how was the rest of the Bay Area?  how was my moms place, how was my mom?  I started the car and headed over to my moms place.  On the way there we continued to hear reports of a collapsed freeway in Oakland.  I didn't recognize the name at the time, but I would later learn it was roadway I drove on almost every day.

My mom was fine, and seemed a bit surprised that I had felt the need to check on her over 'just a little ground shaking'.  I again figured it would be best to sit tight for a while, and maybe watch the news.  My friends called home to let their families know they were OK.  While watching the news we learned that Caltrans had shutdown the San Mateo bridge for inspection.  It would reopen in the morning.  Not wanting to drive around the bay, back to Oakland we ended up spending the night at my moms place.

That is what I remember from 20 years ago today.

Tags: bay area, earthquake, hillsdale mall, mom
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: thankful

I have found my self trying to remember all the reasons I am not interested in another laptop a few times, so I figured I should just document it somewhere, and add to it as needed:

1. I want real cooling fans.  Tired of my laptop over heading and spontaneously  shutting down due to over heating.  This is after adjusting fan settings and placing on a laptop cooler.  Of course, this is what you get when you cram an Intel P4 Desktop CPU running at 3.2Ghz into a laptop case.  Oddly, the overheating tends to only happen when running iTunes.
2. Too many wires.  3 USB plugs, some which can't be merged onto one hub for power/bandwidth reasons.  Power cable, network (wireless is not fast enough for me when connecting to my file server), speakers, external monitor, etc.
3. I never use it as a laptop anymore, partially due to #2.  I now have a netbook for mobile / coffee table use, and honestly, the iPhone has replaced my need to even carry the netbook around with me anymore.  Safari is that good.
4. Sound.  I am sure this would not be the case with a newer laptop, but the fans in this laptop are very loud, and this is after cleaning.  Add to this the sound of the laptop cooler it is sitting on, and it sounds like I am in a server room.
5. Being used as a desktop replacement has not been good to the battery, which is now stuck at 0%.

For some of this, I am sure it is just due to owning a desktop replacement laptop that is 3 years old, and a newer laptop, with newer laptop CPUs would not be as much of an issue.  There is still not much point if I do not need to take it with me, and the Netbook gives me access to all non Apple specific things stored on my file server.

I am also considering make the switch back to a Mac again, although my last attempt with a crappy iBook did not go so well.  These days they are all Intel based, and that means that if I still can't get OS X to work the way I want, I can at least run Windows on it, and/or guest it with out the additional CPU translation.  I even hear you can integrate Windows apps into OS X, but that sounds like a negative feature to me.

At this point I have drank the koolaid a few times.  I ripped all my CDs into Apple Lossless in iTunes, purchased an iPod, and now an iPhone.  I might as well take the next step, buy a Mac, and put an Apple sticker on my car.

I am considering a MacMini or a 24" iMac.  This is what I know so far:

• Small
• Quiet
• I can get any monitor I like for it. Supports 2 monitors.
• Cheap, starting at $599, what I paid for my current 3 year old laptop.
• If being a Mac owner does not work out, can also use it as a media server.

• May use laptop parts, including HD.
• Still no 4" fans
• Limited to 2.0Ghz
• Limited to 4Gb RAM (although this should be enough for anyone)
• Drives are only 5400 rpm

• Built in screen makes perfect laptop replacement.
• Faster speeds than the MacMini
• Memory up to 8Gb.
• I have been told that it does not use laptop style parts such as the hard drive.
• Supports an external monitor.
• Drives are 7200 RPM

• Much more expensive than MacMini
• Might be cheaper to get my own screen + MacMini
• Still no 4" fans

Tags: desktop, laptop, mac
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Listening to: Sound of loud fans

Prompted by a recent conversation... Poll #1437956 Bath Towels
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

How many times do you use a bath towel before putting it in the laundry?

Tags: bath, habits, laundry, towels
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: Curious