As you may or may not know, my birthday was on the 16th (I feel like everyone is blogging about their August birthdays and what they got now—MakerBlock, Spacexula). Because few in my family actually understand what I do, they all just give me money. So, with those birthday funds, I bought myself a Sapphire 100282-TXSR, a Vapor-X ATI Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition graphics card that performs as good as, if not better than, an HD 5870. This is the first $340 step I've taken in my $1200 quest to upgrade my computer.

I also bought an RS232 serial 20x2 character VFD that can be used with a computer just by wiring it up with a serial port and can be used with TTL level logic by using a few extra components. $30 on ebay. I plan on either using this with my webserver to show load or with my MakerBot to... Do... Something?

Last, but not least, I bought a wireless-N usb stick for $17 on ebay. Why did I do this? Well, when I installed the broadcom Crystal HD card in my netbook, I had to remove the WiFi card. I like having wifi in my netbook, so while it was open, I found USB D+ and D- on the second mini pci-e port (that lacks a connector) and +5V from the VGA port and GND from other USB ports and I soldered wires to them. Now, all I have to do is solder those wires to the USB WiFi adapter (after I remove its case) and I'll once again have internal wireless-N. Of course, I'll have to put the adapter in a place where the antenna will have good reception...

As a side note, MakerBot must really love MakerBlock to have given him those extras as a birthday present! I wish MakerBot loved me, too... I have a Batch 5 MakerBot, MakerBlock's is Batch 9—shouldn't I get something special for being an early adopter? ;D

Nah, I don't really care; I just want my MakerBot to work as good as some other peoples' MakerBots!

Well, I did some testing, and I found out that the connector for the Core Duo MacBook keyboard connector is really just a USB port. Also, after pouring over a datasheet, I found that the two PSoC's on the keyboard's board are connected over an I2C bus and then the one labeled "B" is the one with the USB connection to the logic board. The one labeled "A" is the keyboard controller.

With this newfound information, in theory, I could make that internal USB port external, giving my DIY-intosh an extra USB port to work with. In practice, those leads are just too small to solder.

Also using this information, I attempted to turn a MacBook keyboard and trackpad into a USB keyboard and trackpad, but as I soldered the D+ and D- connections to the test points, the stress on one of the points broke it off. I also lost one of the SMT resistors after I tried to solder to it (after I broke off the test point). I can plug it in to a computer, but it is not recognized. I haven't tried plugging it into a Mac yet, so it may just be a driver issue.

Please use and expand on this information! I've already reduced by $10 the value of a $25 keyboard assembly (I <3 ebay), I want to know if I can make an external MacBook keyboard + trackpad before I drop $50 on another one!

I sent this info to http://pinouts.ru/ so that others can benefit from this.

Edit (4/17/2013): Pinouts.ru seems to be defunct/compromised, but I found a link to another pinouts website that seems to have mirrored the pinouts.ru page. http://pinoutsguide.com/Inputs/apple_macbook_keyboard_pinout.shtml

I like to give my friends and family recommendations on products. I like to give them Amazon Affiliate links. The problem? Whenever I want to do that, there's an annoying process I have to go to to do that, and only I can use that process. If anyone wants to buy something and they want to credit me, they can't make affiliate links and have to ask me to make a link for them. So, to remedy this, I took 2 hours out of my day to make a PHP script that anyone can use to make Affiliate links from normal Amazon product links. How does it work? Well, it's quite simple, really. The user enters their Amazon product link, then my script takes that link, strips the product ID from it, and adds that product ID to my pre-formatted link, which is then displayed to the user to click on. It's under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 License the Apache License 2.0, so feel free to distribute (and modify) it as long as you credit me for the original.

Here it is:

Well, I just bought some new parts for my Makerbot. First, because my build platform broke, I bought the MakerBot Heated Build Platform Kit. I decided that, since I was switching back to ABS, I should be using a heated platform. I also didn't want to pay for a normal build platform now and pay for a heated build platform later when I'll really want it. Second, I bought the Magnetic Rotary Encoder PCB. I got 3 samples of the chip a while ago, so I just bought this because it may come in handy in the future. Also, I wanted to practice soldering SMT parts by hand. Finally, I bought the MK5 Drive Gear Upgrade Kit because it's just so much better than the current one.

This set of parts is a little over half of all the parts needed to build a RepRap Mendel. If I don't get any offers for the complete half-set, I will start offering parts individually. If you want individual parts, please contact me at cyrozap AT gmail DOT com.

Make offers on it at http://sellsimp.ly/6s.

See it at http://item.ebay.com/120596951037

See it at http://item.ebay.com/120596950987

It outputs 12V at 1.0A over the Firewire port.

Go to http://sellsimp.ly/5z to see the Mendel Mini parts that I posted! It's a half-set, so if you're having trouble printing some of the parts for the Mendel Mini, or want to get a head start on printing your own set, this is the set for you! If I don't get any offers for the complete half-set, I'll start offering parts individually. Email me if you're interested in individual parts.

Yay me! I downloaded the entire database as a .sql file, opened it up in gedit, did a Find/Replace for cyrozap.blogdns.com to cyrozap.com, restored the database with that file, and I was done! I'm sure I could have done a similar thing from the command line, but I don't know MySQL very well.

Mission accomplished! ;D

For some reason, it only works in Google Chrome—all other browsers that I've tried (Firefox, IE, Safari) don't show the theme. I've changed the theme, repaired the database, but nothing works. Maybe if I didn't change the domain and upgrade Wordpress at the same time, this would have been easier to debug...