Today I was attempting to use my trusty WiebeTech Notebook DriveDock (NBDD) with an Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. I plugged it in as I usually do with my PowerBook, and everything seemed fine. I was able to open files stored on the drive without problem. After a while I started to save my work; and I found the activity light would illuminate and the system would hang! An icon would appear, but the resulting file was unreadable! This is a problem; I was virtually unable to write to the disk.

Immediately I thought I had a bad hard disk attached–but it worked fine on my PowerBook. No references in the system.log either. Fortunately I found a Firmware Updater for Oxford 911 based bridges over at FWDepot. After downloading and wading my way through the sketchy app, I found I was running version 3.8 of the Oxford 911 chip firmware. An update to 4.0 was successful; initial tests seem to confirm it is working on Intel based macs too!

So it seems there is an incompatibility between Intel based Macs and Oxford 911 bridges with firmware before version 4.0. I was unable to find this documented elsewhere; has everyone simply stopped using their hard disk enclosures from 2003?

Acclaim Lighting makes LED based lighting products. Some of their products include architectural lighting, high brightness fixtures utilizing Luxeon LEDs, and even lighting to cover a whole floor or wall. It all is controlled by DMX-512. Well–almost; the interesting fixture here is the X-Panel Frame. This device consists of 12 5×5 RGB LED arrays, arranged in a matrix. Due to the number of channels, it needs more than 512 channels so it supports “DMX-1000K,” a protocol I am completely unfamiliar with. Fortunately, if you limit yourself to 6 X-Panel modules, DMX-512 works just fine, and the display size is just a bit limited.

Now, of course I was unwilling to use the recommended software provided by Acclaim; it didn’t run on my platform of choice. Actually, I didn’t even have a copy of the stuff. Nor could I find a USB DMX-512 interface. But I did have an idea.

The power of Cocoa allowed me to whip up a little application for my Mac in about two evenings. It took about 2 more days to finish up all the features. But what exactly does it do? First I made the whole display blink, then added some chasing features, and did some automated fading. Simple stuff, but it was lots of fun. It made me want to do more; so I wrote a little function that would translate from normal cartesian coordinates+color to the DMX data, reflecting the physical orientation of the device. An NSImageWell later, and I could drag & drop photos and have them displayed on the LEDs. The resolution was low, and my scaling unoptimized , but video was the most fulfilling.

But fancy Cocoa programming does me no good without a way to physically control the device. Fortunately I happened to have my EasyLase USB interface handy. I wired up a level converter with some MAX-485 chips, according to the wiring diagram included in the manual. I had recently finished testing the DMX-512 portion of the EasyLase USB Driver for OS X, but this was the first time I used it with a real device : ). (if you need a copy, let me know)

Please excuse the low quality of the video, I just kinda hacked it together. The screen capture and live video are slightly out of sync, and the CCD in my digital camera simply isn’t able to handle the brightness of the LEDs.

The video clip at the end is complements of Charlie Deets. Please don’t laugh at the poor software interface design; it was just a toy.

It has long bothered a friend of mine and myself that there isn’t a keyboard shortcut for the “Message Viewer” menu item in Mail.app. Of course there is ⌘-1 to bring up the Inbox, but it only works if the Message Viewer is not minimized. If it is–nothing happens. ⌘-0 brings up Activity Viewer; hardly what we’re looking for. So here I introduce to you ⌘-↩ (command-return) for Mail.app. A small hack you can apply to Mail will bind ⌘-↩ to “Message Viewer” from the Window menu.

Instructions:

EDIT (Aug 13, 2007): Be sure to read the comments before considering executing these–perhaps hackish–instructions.

1. Quit Mail. Make a backup copy of Mail.app
2. Ctrl-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents, navigate to “Contents/Resources/English.lproj”.
3. Replace MailViewer.nib with the one included in the zip file.
4. Re-launch Mail.app and enjoy using command-return to bring up the main window.

If you are familiar with Mac OS X programming, you might choose to simply open the MailViewer.nib file from Mail with Interface Builder and edit the keyboard shortcut for the Message Viewer menu option.

A couple notes of caution: The instructions here are for Mac OS X 10.4, with Mail.app version 2.1. Even a minor bug fix in Mail could destroy this modification, or make these steps obsolete. Do not attempt to use the attached .nib file with other versions of Mail.app, especially as it is updated in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard.

As a side note, in authoring this post I found out how to type special characters and symbols in Mac OS X. It is easy to insert special symbols with the Character Palette, but some symbols I’ve wanted to type directly from the keyboard as I encounter them somewhat often. The key is to turn on “Unicode Hex Input” in the International preference pane, under the Input Menu tab. When this method is selected, any unicode character can be accessed by holding option and typing the 4 digit code. For example, the european point of interest symbol, or command character, can be accessed by typing ⌥-2318.

I was able to find the information about the Unicode Hex Input mode in an article from 2002, and the character codes in a PDF from unicode.org.