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Oh, I found what I'm getting myself for Christmas!
USB Geiger Counter
Description: This is a USB powered Geiger Counter equipped with an ATMega168 that can be programmed in circuit using one of the programmer below. Simply plug the unit into USB (make sure you have FTDI drivers installed), open a terminal program to the correct COM power at 9600bps, and you will see random bits being generated from the random background radiation. Here at SparkFun, on average, we get about 20 counts a minute.
This can be used to create a true random number generator.
the new Mac Mini has FW800. The audio interface we have is FW400. Will there be performance issues in an adapter to connect the two?
My old MacBook died. so I started looking at specs for new MacBooks.
I can see absolutely no reason to get the 13" MacBook Pro over the new white MacBook. It is a teensy bit lighter and smaller (and I mean a TEENSY bit) and has an SD Card reader... in exchange for a smaller hard drive and the metal enclosure that, based on my experience, is actually significantly more fragile than the plastic. Why would I pay $200 more for that?
Am I missing something?
New MacBook doesn't have Firewire, so if that's important to you then it can be a deal breaker. I own 3 of the older MacBooks but I won't be buying any of the new ones because of this omission. They also dropped the individual audio in and out ports in favor of a single port that con operate as an input or an output.
t Sends email to Gris in blatant self interest.
I do so love to tinker.
My external hard drives are all USB/firewire and I don't have a video camera. Don't really require the firewire these days, though it does annoy me on principle.
I also don't need audio ports very often. Maybe the input if I ever decide to do any recording, but I actually have a USB converter for microphones and my electric piano does USB-midi out, so just a headphone out should be plenty.
So it looks like the MacBook is for me.
DCJ, I'll e-mail you back later. I'm going to salvage the hard drive and maybe the RAM from the MacBook so I'm not sure what remaining parts will help you. Maybe the battery. The computer smells like burning - I think I fried the motherboard pretty good with an accidental Diet Dr. Pepper soaking.
I have another one coming at some point, so any part of a dead one might get me that much closer to a Frankensteinian creation.
Or is that Fronkensteenian?
Apparently if you get rid of QuickTime, iTunes doesn't work. That's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that you have to reinstall iTunes and lose all your music, podcasts and playlists. How is that remotely acceptable?
It wouldn't surprise me, but I just got a new computer at work and copied over my library files before installing iTunes and had no problem.
