GoPro HD!
Posted by luke in Audio/Video on July 16th, 2010
My GoPro HD arrived today! Seriously can’t wait to crank it out when i get home!
Melting Moments
About a year ago, i started making Melting Moments. If you haven’t had one, go out and try one now, because everyone loves these things! I make them fairly often because they’re quick and easy to knock up. This is a recipe i put together after fine tuning a bunch of other recipes into one big super recipe. After all, thats how secret recipes are born, by ‘borrowing’ other recipes and tuning them to your liking!
Anyway, i hope you can make these and i hope they turn out awesome. If you do end up making them, let me know what you think in the comments, along with any suggestions you might have for fine tuning the secret recipe 
Makes 18-20 finished biscuits
Ingredients
- 250g butter, cubed and softened
- 260g (1 3/4 cups) plain flour
- 60g (1/3 cup) icing sugar, sifted
- 60g (1/3 cup) custard powder
- 1 tsp vanilla bean paste (or vanilla essence)
- 150g (2/3 cup) icing sugar, sifted
- 45g butter, at room temperature
- 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
- 3 tablespoons lemon juice
Method
- Preheat oven to 150°C and line some baking trays with non-stick baking paper.
- Beat together the sifted icing sugar, butter, and vanilla bean paste in a bowl with an electric mixer until creamy. Sift together the flour and custard powder, then add this to the butter/icing sugar mixture and mix on low speed. After a while you’ll see it will form a dough. Roll the dough into small balls. It will help to flour your hands a little because the dough can be a bit sticky. Place the balls on the baking trays about 3cm apart. Once your done making all the balls, grab a fork and then gently press it on top of each to flatten them out a little. This should give you a disc around 3.5cm in diameter and about 1cm thick. Now, bake them in the oven for around 15 minutes or until cooked. I find mine usually need around 17-18 minutes. When they are done, they should be golden underneath and firm to touch. Once they’re cooked, cool them on a wire.
- For the filling, beat the vanilla essence, butter, lemon juice and icing sugar in a small bowl with and electric mixer until creamy. Sometimes my filling is a bit runny, so i sift in a little more icing sugar as i go. Refrigerate the filling until you’re ready to assemble the biscuits.
- To assemble the biscuits, spread the base of one biscuit with filling and then join with another. Now eat them!
Cityrail Tickets
I was going through my desk drawer at work the other day and found a heap of old cityrail train tickets. Then I started to wonder what exactly is on the magnetic stripes in these tickets. So i got a cheap magnetic card reader from eBay and found that it contains 2 tracks of data. I’ve included 3 examples below…
Example 1
Track 1: B00DF10003AF4012B551F37AADECC4C990BB8552A21CC008CB
Track 2: B00DF10003AF4012B551F37AADECC4C990BB8552A21CC008CB
Expires: 2010-06-27 (Weekly Ticket)
Destinations: Sutherland -> North Sydney
Numbers on back: 21JE 1826113815
Bottom Corner: BN-01-10-INGFEDCBA987654321
Example 2
Track 1: B0364ABBB814FBA90EE2C07AADECC4C990BB8552A21CC008CB
Track 2: B0364ABBB814FBA90EE2C07AADECC4C990BB8552A21CC008CB
Expires: 2010-07-04 (Weekly Ticket)
Destinations: Sutherland -> North Sydney
Numbers on back: 28JE 1948076713
Bottom Corner: M0903589
Example 3
Track 1: B06A867774D4489A3DD1F3D007466E6333FF588B3B1CC008CB
Track 2: B06A867774D4489A3DD1F3D007466E6333FF588B3B1CC008CB
Expires: 2010-07-11 (Weekly Ticket)
Destinations: Sutherland -> North Sydney
Numbers on back: 05JL 1940877977
Bottom Corner: M0904821
If you read the ticket before and also after its swiped through the gate, it appears the data on the tracks does not change. Not sure what any of this means at the moment, but looking at the last half of the tracks on the cards i saw, it seems like these may be the stations i travel to and from? All 3 cards seem to have “CC008CB” in common. I’m also curious to see if it’s possible to clone the data of one card to another and use it through the gates.
Has anyone experimented with this or decoded what the data is or how it works? Possibly even how to manipulate the data into creating a valid ticket?
First Arduino Sketch
Just did my first Arduino sketch! Just flashes 5 LED’s on and off in sequence on a loop of 5. Not super exciting yet, but gotta start somewhere. Video and sketch are below for anyone interested.
Download: Flash5_LED_Loop.pde
Arduino!
Got my Arduino today! Only cost me $37 bucks from Toysdownunder.com! Hopefully can do some cool things with it soon. I’ll add it to the list of projects i start but never finish 
Things i plan on doing with it…
- CNC Controller (so i can build my own CNC machine)
- Make a daft punk helmet (just because)
- Control an RC car through the intertubes
If you have an Arduino, what are some of the things you’ve made?
Project Explorer: Day 1
So last year i decided to start trying to build a guitar. I’ll be putting up progress shots as i go along, but for now, these are some (delayed) shots of when i got the slab of mahogany, and after it was cut out.
Time taken from slab to cutout and cleanup: Approx 2.5 hours.
Macbook Pro Hard Drive Swap
Posted by luke in Instructional on July 22nd, 2009
I decided to upgrade my Macbook Pro hard drive not long ago as I was running a little low on disk space. So I had a look around and decided on a WD Scorpio Blue 500gb SATA Drive (WD5000BEVT). I chose this drive because it’s fairly cheap and the performance looked pretty good compared to the 7200rpm drives. 500gb is perfect because I wanted to set up a windows partition with bootcamp as well.
Before you begin you will need the following:
- A small Phillips head screwdriver
- A T6 Torx screwdriver
- The ability to read
You will want to make sure that before you begin, you have backed up all the data you want to keep to a removable drive/DVD/other media. The whole process will take you around 30-45 minutes. It took me about 35 minutes and I was taking photos so you could probably do it quicker. But seriously, don’t rush or you could break something!
Step 1: Start by removing the battery. Slide the two tabs and the battery will pop up. Once that’s out, remove the RAM compartment cover by unscrewing the three Phillips screws that hold it on.
Step 2: You can do the swap without needing to remove the RAM modules, but I did this just in case. If you want to remove the RAM, just use your finger to push the little metal brackets on the sides out and the RAM will pop up a little. You can now slide them out.
Step 3: Begin removing the screws on the back edge of the laptop (there are four of them). You also need to remove the two Torx screws next to where the RAM modules go. Once you have taken these out, check the inside edge of the battery compartment. There are two Phillips screws you need to remove here.
Step 4: On the left and right sides of the notebook, there are 8 small Phillips screws. Remove these. Once that is done, remove the last two on the back (at either side of the hinge).
Step 5: Flip your Macbook Pro over and lift the screen up. Starting from the top area of the keyboard (on either side), GENTLY pry the top of the notebook off. You want to start prying from near the screen and work downwards towards the front. This step may require a little gentle pressure, but DONT just yank it open as there is a small ribbon cable attaching the keyboard to the rest of the notebook. I needed to move the top panel up and down a few times to get it to loosen a little.
Step 6: Once the top panel with the keyboard is free, lift it from the front (as shown in the photo). You will see the ribbon cable joining it to the rest of the computer. Lift the tape and gently remove the ribbon cable from the board.
Step 7: Time to remove the hard drive. This is located towards the front left of your Macbook Pro (shown below). There is a small metal bracket holding the hard drive in. Begin by removing the two Phillips screws that keep the bracket in. Once this is done, remove the bracket. There is a ribbon cable that is stuck with adhesive to the top of the hard drive. Try not to damage the cable by bending it when you remove it from the top. I used a small plastic knife (relax, it wasn’t sharp), just to get under the adhesive and use it to get the ribbon cable off.
Step 8: Pull the hard drive up and out a little from your Macbook Pro. You will notice the SATA data/power connector at the back. Remove this from the old hard drive. You should now be holding the old hard drive in your hand without it being connected in any way to your Macbook Pro. Remove the four little Torx screws from each side of the hard drive and re-attach these to your new hard drive.
Now you just need to complete the steps in reverse order to reassemble the whole thing. Once you have it all back together, boot up with your OS X install or Recovery disc. From inside the OS X Installer, my new hard drive wasn’t recognised at first. To fix this, click on Utilities and select Disk Utility. Select your new hard drive from the list here and “Erase” it. Once that’s done, proceed through the OS X Installer and you’ll be sweet!
After a few weeks of normal use with all my apps back on, I’ve noticed a pretty drastic performance increase! Applications load quicker and copying files is noticeably faster! The whole upgrade costed me $130 in total which was the cost of the hard drive. With 5 times the space, and at least a 50% noticeable performance gain, this is the perfect upgrade for those of you who are wanting more space and a little extra performance from your Macbook Pro.
disclaimer: if you attempt this and somehow break your hard drive, your macbook pro, or both, i take no responsibility. please seriously consider this before you do it. if you dont feel comfortable pulling your macbook pro apart, please take it to an apple technician and get them to do it for you. the above were the steps i took to replace my drive. your experience may differ (lets hope it doesnt, but hey, it might)
Xbox 360 Hard Drive Upgrade (wd1200bevs)
Posted by luke in Instructional on October 21st, 2008
so i was thinking of getting a 120gb microsoft hard drive for my 360 a while back, but i figured why am i paying 200 bucks for something that probably costs less than half that? so i did some googling and found that some smart people managed to get a certain type of drive (the western digital 1200bevs) to work with their 360!
so i managed to buy 2 of these drives online for $64 each! one for me, one for a friend, split shipping of 10 bucks and its $69 total. bargain! once i had them i could start modding my 360.
about a week later i got my drives. i’ll share the process i used and the experiences i had to get the drive to work in my xbox.
you will need the following applications/tools for this:
- hddhackr 0.91 (download)
- xplorer360 extreme2 edition (download)
- hp flash drive creator (if you dont have a floppy drive like me, download)
- windows 98 boot files (to go with the above, download)
- i had to take the existing 20gb drive from my xbox and disassemble it. this is fairly easy, i just followed this youtube video, but yeah its pretty basic stuff.
- to get the 120gb drive to work, you need to flash it with the hddss.bin file of a legit drive. you’ll need to look for this as im not supposed to put it here as its “copyrighted”… due to not having a floppy drive, i used the win98 boot files and the flash creator (above) to make a bootable usb drive. then just copy hddhackr to a folder in there with your hddss.bin file in it and it should be sweet.
- i then got the new 120gb drive and attached it to one of my pc’s sata ports. boot off the usb stick/floppy and used the hddhackr tool to flash the legit .bin file onto the drive. i also made an undo.bin file just in case.
- then i put the 120gb drive in my xbox to format it. just connect the drive up as normal and power on the xbox. go to the settings blade and select ‘memory’. mine came up with a drive just saying ‘unformatted’. if you press format you will be asked to give your consoles serial number (so you dont accidently erase your drive i guess?). once you enter that the drive will format.
- back at your pc, power it off and connect your 20gb drive to a sata port. use xplorer360 extreme 2 to browse the drive. i had HUGE problems here but i managed to work out a simple way to get this to work. DONT USE A WINDOWS VISTA PC. i tried 3 vista machines and none of them worked using xplorer360. they would get the files off but wouldnt put any files at all back onto the drive. using a windows XP machine, you can drag and drop files to and from your xbox drive. drag all the files in partition 3 to a temporary folder somewhere on your desktop (or anywhere really). i had some problems with a certain file and the “$SystemUpdate” folder that would crash the program. i ended up copying each folder one by one until i eventually found a 0kb .db file that was giving me problems. so i made a new empty text file with the same name in my backed up folder. once that is done, click “Drive > Backup Partition 2″. this will backup the area of your hard drive that you need for playing old xbox games. i dont play them, but yeah, just in case i guess.
- by the time your data is copied off the 20gb drive your 120 should be well and truly done formatting. attach the 120gb drive to your sata port and do the same as step 5 but in reverse. restore the partition 2 bin file and then drag and drop your partition 3 files back into partition 3. after i did this, i had to reflash the hddss.bin file back onto it again otherwise the xbox didnt recognise it.
- finally, attach the 120gb drive to your xbox. it should come up with all of your content on it. i had a small issue with my profile not signing in to live, so i went into ‘memory’ and deleted my gamer profile (when prompted DONT delete the content). then i went to recover gamertag and after downloading it all again, it worked perfectly!
