Open House Party

We’re really excited to announce that Baltimore Hackerspace has moved to a new location and we would like you to come help us celebrate. Come socialize, learn and check out the facility. We will have our projects on display and will be doing a couple workshops. There is also a rumor that there may be food!

If you are attending I invite you to RSVP so we can get an idea of how many people are coming.

http://www.meetup.com/Baltimore-Hackerspace/events/89508782/

When: November 17th, 2012
Time: Noon – whenever
Where: 6410 Landay Ave. Baltimore MD 21237 MAP

Voiding a warranty on an external hard drive

After a recent hard drive failure, I realized I need to start doing some proper backups (Duh, right?) Anyway, while shopping for hard drives to build a backup NAS (for which I need some internal drives, not external USB drives) I discovered a trend where a lot of external hard drives are cheaper than internal drives at the same capacity. How does this make sense?

I ended up purchasing these 3TB hard drives for about $140 each at Office Depot. It’s a crap shoot on which hard drive will be inside, but it will normally be made by the same manufacturer, and be of that capacity. (You would be surprised to find out this isn’t _always_ the case).

Being a 3TB Seagate, a quick search over at Newegg shows this drive which sells for $229. That’s a $90 dollar difference. WOW! So doing this instead of buying internal drives is a bargain so far.

In my sons nursery, we have the changing table against the wall. The problem is the only light in the room is in the middle of the room from a ceiling fan. So basically while your changing him you are blocking the light with your body.

So me and the wife went looking for a light to add to his changing table, we found one at IKEA that we like but it’s a ceiling mount light with 3 individual 35 watt flood bulbs, with cartoonish fish as the housings. I’m not about to drill a hole in the ceiling and install a wall switch (as the instructions state it’s supposed to be installed), so we looked around for something else but nothing caught our eye.

I decided to just get this fixture, and hack it.

In the lighting section of IKEA they have some DIY lamp kit, I just needed a cord since I’m going to be plugging this in the wall, and they’re pretty cheap. So I grabbed the neon green one since it looks cool.

First thing I did was open everything up to see what we are dealing with…