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November 04, 2008

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OMG this is my first post!! how awesome!

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On Western Digital hard drives, PUIS and Rocket Raid controllers

Disclaimer: This procedure worked for me. Use at your own risk. It uses software not written by me and downloaded randomly off the internet. If you break something, it isn't my fault. So a while back I bought 4x1T WD green hard drives (WD10EACS) and a rocket raid 1740 to use with them. I eventually ended up using them as JBOD (turns out it didnt support hardware raid 5) for a few years with no problems. This was until I upgraded my server with a motherboard that supported enough sata drives and no longer needed the raid controller. Turns out, if you ever set staggered spin-up on these drives as I did, it sets some internal flag on the drive to use a thing called PUIS or Power Up In Standby. This means the drives don't actually start spinning until they receive a request for some data. Problem is, these particular drives don't support it (or something) and some sort of hack is in place in the rocket raid controller to get around this. Long story short, none

The Bluff Trail

Went hiking last weekend. It was fun. Starting near Howqua (past Mansfield) at 8 mile flat, we did the bluff trail circuit (details here ). This starts off as a moderate climb over some mountain along 8 mile spur and then down again. 8 Mile Spur views Then the fun came when we had to climb The Bluff itself which is a huge mountain (1726m). Well worth it though as the views were fantastic - especially Mt Eadley Stoney to the east: Mt Eadley Stoney Climbing the bluff was quite difficult, there was some pretty serious rocks to climb up to get to the summit. Difficult with an 18kg pack on your back. Slept the first night at the Bluff Hut which is a few k's from the summit of The Bluff. Handily, there were already some people there with a fire going for us. It then was massively windy and rainy ALL night - had to get a good nights sleep. The Bluff Hut - early morning The next day we travelled along the 16 mile jeep track (not for 16 miles) which was mostly down

The Centurion

Have you ever played the brutal drinking game called the Centurion? It goes like this - have one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. It may not sound like much, but if you think about it, a 30ml shot 100 times is 3 litres of beer in a little under two hours. Anyway, I've played this a few times and the biggest problem is keeping track of time and who has drank what. Usually you need a timekeeper who isn't playing to ensure that all drinks are taken and that we drink at the appropriate time. Well, for an upcoming bucks weekend (mine), I decided to remedy this. I build it into an old tool case I had lying around. There are 8 double seven segment displays to keep track of players scores, all driven by 595 chips attached to transistor arrays. I decided not to use a 7-seg driver chip because it would have been more of a pain to solder. The 595 and ULN2803 transistor array can pretty much be mounted side-by-side. Since I didn't etch my own board, this me

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