matthew andersen

I performed a pretty simple and generic conversion of an ATX power supply to a bench power supply for projects. Theres tons of information on the web about how to do it. I thought I’d share my thought process on a few of my choices.

One project used all of the lines from each rail and wired them to the posts. Since I was using 2A (for 3.3V and 5V) and 3.75A (for 12V) I figured the power running through a single wire would be safe. The gauge of the wires is sufficient to handle the 2 or more amps I’m running. For instance my PSU maxes out at 35A over the 5V rail. This was spread between only 6 wires. At full draw thats nearly 6A over each line. I could be wrong, I’m very bad at the analog side of things.

However if you do want to use all of the rail lines so you can use 35A I can recommend RadioShack part 274-661. The inside of the posts are a lot longer than most of the parts I saw people using online. You could probably get 6 rings on one post easily.

I ended up having to take out my fan too, like others. But this was due to a complete lack of planning on my part. When I placed the LEDs put them far too over to the left. Just plan better, everything should fit in really easily. From what I can tell older power supplies seem better for this in a lot of ways. You get -5V, you don’t have to deal with the 3.3V sense line. And the power resister may not be a requirement.

And now pictures. The external isn’t cleaned up and labeled yet. I need some rubbing alcohol to take the pin off.

Recently SeeqPod.com went offline. I don’t know if they’ll be coming back or not. However, the widget I wrote about a year ago never worked well because of inconsistent results. I know they were caching content, but my widget didn’t have access to that content, so it never worked well. I’m going to make wild assumptions that this is why they were taken offline as well.

That being said, the widget itself is essentially dead. But in the event it might help someone I’m posing the source code for the widget and its downloading component. It is a fairly comprehensive example of how to integrate an external plugin into Dashboard Widget. Also its an example on how to use the NSURLDownload objects.

If you have any questions about it, leave a comment with your e-mail. There is no real license for it, just do what you want.

Download Here

A bunch of people have asked me where they can start learning about how to use the Terminal.app in Mac OS X. Unfortunately, this is a pretty loaded question with no direct answer. So I’ve been slowly working on a tutorial to introduce people to “The way of the terminal.”

It is available here: http://barelystable.com/tutorials/terminal/

So if you have a desire to find out a little bit about the underbelly of Mac OS X, please read it. You’ll note that there are pages that are devoid of content currently, I will be updating from time to time. I’d also like to get some feedback on what people would like to learn and I’ll work on those. Please comment, yo!