What’s that little slot for?
Do you own a Mac? Do you develop for Windows? If so then you're in the same bucket that I am. I worked for the evil empire for two years of my life, and ever since I have been completely hooked on their development stack. The beauty of C# easily surpasses any statically typed language I have ever worked with, but I digress. This is not a post on C#, but a post on a little gadget I found that can make VMWare work "more better" so you can stay within the UI bliss of OSX but still work the evil empire day job effectively.
Those of you with MacBook Pros, look on the left side of the laptop. What do you see? Well, probably a single USB port (thanks Steve...), a mag-charger port, and some weird flap thing. Most people have no idea what the slot behind that flap is for--and I venture a guess that it sits vacant on 99% of the MacBooks in existence. Well, it shouldn't anymore. Why? Because of this.
That little guy sits flush in the PCMCIA slot on the left hand side of your mac resulting in an instant (as in instant gratification) 48GB boost to your lappys hard disk space--and it's an SSD to boot. The PCMCIA interface is not quite as fast as a SATA 2/3 solid state disk, but still faster than a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive connected via FireWire*.
You can use this extension of space for anything really--I was using it as an onboard TimeMachine drive until inspiration struck me today. There are even reports of people installing OSX on it, which has a wicked cool factor when you pop the card into someone else's MacBook and happily boot your instance of Lion/Leopard to continue with whatever you were working on.
So how can we use this little guy to make VMWare faster? Well after googling around a bit, I found that one of the major recommendations to make VMWare faster is to boot it from an external drive (duh). It's funny that I didn't think of this immediately because I used to do this all the time with my old XP machines--I guess the utility of always having a Windows VM on-board the laptop precluded installing it on an external drive; there's less things to carry around that way. However, thanks to this tiny $128 wonder, I can now place all my virtual machines on a different drive and reap the marginal performance boost of freeing up the system drive to handle OSX functions while controller on the card handles VM read/writes. As an additional bonus my MacBook sports a smaller 128 GB SSD and placing my vm's on the card offloads the tremendous storage hit from housing a full blown Windows 7 virtual machine to the tune of around 32 GB on the system drive.
After moving the VM to the external drive I have noticed some real performance gains. Nothing super, but OSX is certainly snappier than it was before while running the VM. Also, take into account that my MacBook is almost 4 years old and it still sports a 2.2ghz barely dual-core intel CPU. I imagine newer hardware will realize even more gains. So tweakers and VMWare users looking for a snappier VM: definitely invest in one of these. After all, unless you have a 3G netcard you probably aren't using that slot anyway.
Before/After pictures:
* I realize theoretically this is not true, but empirically it is. My personal benchmarks have shown that the FileMate outruns my 1TB WDD Caviar Black in an OWC Mercury Quad interface enclosure by around 20%.
Book Nerd
It's been a while since I threw up a technical post--okay so any post but that's beside the point. I recently purchased a slew of books with acronyms for names with the intention of furthering my career. Here's the list:
I'm specifically excited about the Rails book--I have heard quite a bit of buzz around it for a while now and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. There's a couple of other books that are on my list to pick up, but I think these four should be enough for now. I'm starting with the WPF book, then likely moving to Silverlight 4 since it's basically just a subset of WPF. After that I'll likely hit the Unit Testing book and finally the dirty pleasure of the Rails book. I've never been much of a reader when it comes to technical books, but I'm finding that there's so much that I still don't know about some of the technologies that I work with. Given enough time I'm decent at hacking my way to proficiency in a framework, but because of the scarcity of time as a resource in my life lately I think I need a little help.
TB Loop
I'm almost finished with a custom True Bypass loop + Mute switch for the end of my pedal chain. Pictures soon to follow once it's finished. It's been fun building this thing; I may actually consider this as a business on the side after I run some numbers and check how feasible it is. I certainly have a really low business startup overhead of about $20.00 in tools and common parts. All I need now is a toaster oven, spray paint, and a big roll of Teflon wire 
.
LovePedal BBB07 LED Mod
I'm glad to finally get this off my projects list. With the help of a comrade at work, I finished wiring a LED to my BBB07. Those of you who own one know that it's irritating during gigs to have to remember if the stupid thing is on or not. I'm not sure why Sean Michael chose to not include a LED by default.
What you will need
- 5.1k Ohm Resistor
- 3.6 Volt 5mm LED, color or your choice (I used blue)
- A small length of wire
- Some electrical tape
- Wire strippers, cutters, soldering iron, solder, etc.
Step 1: Case Mods
This is the easiest part. You will need to drill a hole in the front cover to support the 5mm LED. I also cut a hole in the side of the BBB07 with a Dremmel to pull the battery clip through so I can connect it my power supply. I had originally intended to add a small, Boss style power jack but because the BBB07 is wired in reverse that would be a pain to engineer for a hobbyist like me.
Step 2: Finding the right LED + Resistor
In order to make the LED work, we need a resistor connected somewhere in the circuit to reduce the voltage to something more suitable. There are several LED resistance calculators on the net (I used this one), and if you wish to use a LED with a different voltage rating than I did you will need to recalculate the resistance for the circuit. I picked a 5.1k Ohm so that the LED glows nice and soft. I previously tried a 248 ohm resistor, but it was so bright it nearly burned my eyes out. One good way to preview your work is to grab a 9V battery, connect the anode to negative, connect the cathode to your resistor, and then connect other end of the resistor to the positive terminal on the battery. If all is connected properly, the LED should glow as brightly as it will when placed into the real circuit.
Step 3: Modifying the Circuit - Connecting the Anode
The BBB07, like most good fuzz pedals, is wired in reverse. This makes wiring the LED up a bit more tricky than if this were conventional polarity. The easiest way I have found is to wire the anode (negative or short end) to the top terminal in the center pole of the switch, and then connect a loose wire from the center terminal to the ground wire of the battery clip. This way, the current running to the LED doesn't affect the signal at all. You will have to chop the battery clip negative lead in half and wire up a T. After you solder all three leads together, use some electrical tape to protect the joint--or some shrink tubing if you are less ghetto than I.
Step 4: Modifying the Circuit - Connecting the Cathode
Connecting the cathode is a bit easier. All we have to do is wire the resistor up to the long end of the LED and then connect the other end of the resistor to the hot terminal on the input jack (oddly enough, it's not the terminal the red wire from the battery clip connects to, but instead the middle one). We want to make sure that we get the right pole of the switch so that our LED will only come on if the pedal has a cable plugged into the input. Use this as a guide:
Step 5: The Finished Product
Finally we can enjoy the convenience of knowing if our BBB07 is on or off on dark stages. Those of us without guitar techs who run our pedals for us anyway. Below are some shots of the finished product. Forgive me for not going into the gory details of why each lead goes where. More or less I poked around with an alligator clip and some basic knowledge of e-mag until I found something that works. For the newbies in doubt: just make your circuit look exactly like mine and make sure all your solder joints are clean.
Aural ecstasy
I have been looking for good set of closed around-the-ear headphones for a long time. After reading tons of reviews I settled on a set of Bose Tri-Port cans. These are not noise canceling headphones--I didn't like the idea of having to change batteries regardless of how long they last.
This was quite possibly the best sub $150 purchase I have made in a long time; right up there with my Boss TU-2 Tuner. Pair these babies with my recently procured Apogee Duet audio interface and you are enveloped in a world of aural ecstasy. Bass hits are punchy and deep, highs come through clean and crisp, and mids are pronounced, but not overbearing and muddy. The Tri-Port's are quite comfortable to wear, and they block out some ambient noise; my new best friend during coding sessions at work =D.
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