Kurucu's Space This is my space, actually.

I have had an iMac for about two years now, and a month ago it broke – out of the warrantee period. I had burnt a DVD and then, just as the process finished and the disk tried to eject, it failed. The disk was unable to eject and would just go back in and remount. This was mildly annoying, but as I generally never use the drive, I wasn’t too bothered. In fact, the most annoying thing was the icon hanging around on the desktop all the time.

However, I decided it was time to rethink my home media setup and wanted to move all my music and videos onto a remote disk. While doing this, I thought I may as well reinstall the whole computer, which hasn’t been rebuilt despite being upgraded to Snow Leopard and me installing and uninstalling lots of applications. I couldn’t see any performance effects from all this, I’m just a tidy person.

But how do you reinstall a computer when your DVD drive is having a love affair with another disk?

My first plan of action was to fix the DVD drive. So, I watched some videos, read some blogs and then, eventually, decided to give it a go. First, you have to pull at the magnetic glass screen with an official screen remover (or TomTom mounting sucker, in my case). Then, you have to unscrew the aluminium casing and pull it off, not snapping the cable to the webcam/light sensor. The most fun part comes next; you unscrew and remove the actual display. I would be less scared performing surgery on myself, but as it turns out I managed to do it without destroying it or the many short cables that connect to its underside.

After all this you can unscrew the DVD drive, disconnect it (having removed the tiniest screws in the world) and then wonder how this tightly integrated, flimsy drive can be accessed without breaking it. I almost gave up, then noticed that just four small screws needed to be undone and the whole top just hinged away. Lovely. I could get right at the disk then, and was able to just take it out.

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I carefully ensured that everything was in its place and working, and then slowly reassembed the mac. I booted it up, it made a noise that it hadn’t made for ages: silence. It felt great. I popped in a trial disk to see what would happen and it grabbed it, mounted it and everything seemed fine. I pressed eject, and it has been mounting and ejecting every three seconds during its powered life since.

Luckily, I have a nice new drive on order, costing €50 including postage from the States.

But I still wanted to reinstall my software and get going, and as I’d recently seen Remote Disk in action, I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to do. And, using it, I have successfully installed Snow Leopard from scratch using Remote Disk on an iMac.

Despite enabling the remote disk options in Terminal and following the usual tips, I still couldn’t see the Remote Disk option when I started with the option key held down.

So, I had another idea, and decided to look at installing from a USB key. It is possible, apparently, according to Maciverse. But I still had relatively little luck as I was using Windows to create the disk images. So, I ended up with a bit of a hybrid solution. I was using a Windows laptop as the DVD host, and managed to get sharing working (unusually for Apple, you have to go into the Windows Control Panel and enable the sharing, after installing the one-step sharing software). I then used the Mac to read the remote disk and directly  restore the USB key from the Remote Disk, following maciverse’s instructions otherwise.

And hey presto, I had a duplicate of the DVD installer in the form of a small and mighty USB key. I option-restarted and the disk was selectable, from where the installation proceeded as normal.

I hope this helps some other impatient mac user, who can’t wait to repair their DVD drive!

Just over a month ago I decided to start making yoghurt. Everyone does something, bread, pasta etc, but I eat a lot of yoghurt and decided that I could, with practice, come to a standard as good as the top-of-the-range ones while having complete control of what goes into them.

I started out by following the guide at wikiHow. It was a pretty successful batch, although a little flavourless. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe, learning from each previous batch. I have used different starters, milks, creams and sugars and have settled on the following recipe.  I am pretty pleased with the current results, so I thought I’d share them here. I use:

• 1.5 litres of whole milk
• A pot of any good jam (strawberry works well, gooseberry was good but black cherry was not really sweet enough)
• I used one and a half pots of Activia as a starter, but now I use one of my previous week’s yoghurts

I start by setting the oven on a non-fan setting on a low heat at around 50′C. Then, I pretty much go as the guide on wikiHow states, I bring the milk to around 85′C. I don’t use a thermometer but instead go by the point at which the milk starts to froth, heating it very gently and stirring it often.

Once it starts to froth I turn off the heat and put the pan into a sink of cold water. Stirring the milk to help cool it down until pressing my wrist against it feels neutral, which is a little lower than body temperature (I guess around 35′, it works so I assume I’m right!).

For me, the oven at 50′ keeps it actually just around 40′, as the fan doesn’t bring the heat near the top into the main part of the oven. I put a tray of 12 large pots into the oven to warm.

Once the milk is at wrist-temperature I stir the pot of yoghurt before stirring it into the milk. Then I spoon one tablespoon of jam into each pot (having taken them from the oven) before topping them up with milk.

I cling-film each one to seal it and then put them back on the tray in the oven for around eight hours. Generally, I do all this while having lunch so that a) it’s not boring and b) I have eight hours ahead of me in which to incubate them. Once the yoghurts are finished I put them directly into the fridge overnight.

Doing this I generally find that the yoghurt takes another day in the fridge before it gets its normal tang, but they are perfectly creamy and edible the morning directly after incubating. The only drawback I have found is that cling-filming each pot is difficult and dull, but it’s also cheap so I put up with it.

I love technology. I don’t necessarily mean gadgets and (specifically) not all the rubbish that some corporations produce in an attempt to make more money, but technology in its greater sense and as a concept. The best part of all is that it provides a massive ground for education and research into every subject including the advancement of itself. This, I think, is the reason why it has come so far so quickly. It is easy to be excited about and, specifically in this case, the computers we create enable us to better simulate atomic relationships, better develop/create toolsets on the micro and nano scale and therefore better make computers.

Computers for a lot of people are just the screen, keyboard and mouse that they interface with; along with the complex and often unintuitive operating systems and software that run on them. My biggest fascination while studying was that to truly understand the computer you have to first understand the transition of an electron across a semiconductor barrier, improbable relationships, energy quanta and a variety of different elements including the very dull (but highly complex) silicon.

Building up from there you get a single transistor, which on its own is as useful as a household lighting switch. You can build these into a variety of logic gates, eventually creating processors, memories and complex control circuitry. On top of this you can start to run simple routines, make different circuits interact (which at this level is still very much in the electronics domain, with load and phase mapping and the involvement of fourrier transforms and magic numbers). On top of this you can run rudimentary ‘programs’ that can add up, subtract and shift… but not divide or multiply. You keep building through the assembler language, literally commanding the processor and being able to implement more complex mathematics.

On top of this we have languages like C, which do the same job but make it much simpler for the human in control with pre-written libraries and a syntax that doesn’t give you a headache. At this level we can start to programmatically interact with other devices, ports and streams of information. We can shade an individual pixel on the monitor red, or send a few characters to a printer. Perhaps take an input from a keyboard or mouse. Then we move onto higher level languages with their garbage collection and frameworks, making control and use of the massive resource of ‘the computer’ easy, standardised and stable.

Finally, someone can make a button which, when pressed, provides you with the words “Hello world!”. And all this overlooks the side-paths like device firmware and building the trusty BIOS or EFI.

Computing and electronics are a miracle to me and so many others, and I am absolutely convinced this is why so many people have got involved and why we have such rapid development. There is literally something for everyone in science, technology and engineering, whether they be theoretical mathematician, physicist or a business analyst. The car engine was developed and has, largely, remained as it was for a century. The improvements seen in the automotive world are nothing like those in the world of electronics, and I think it’s because people see a car moving and sort of accept “that’s it”. With electronics, while the iPod has its own little niche function, the stuff that powers it could have as easily been mechanical or driven by light. It could interface and work with a world of other systems making it better or changing it out of all recognition to be a health monitoring system.

It’s truly inspiring, for me at least. I am a member of STEMNET and the IET and I find it very easy to be an ‘ambassador’ (as is my role for the former) as I am sure you can tell. Science, technology, engineering and maths is going out of fashion in the western world, and it is very important that we at least give the new generations an opportunity to see it for what it could be and what an amazing future it could mean for them.

I will be saying more on this over at One Profession, because there is a lot more to say, but I think this is a sufficiently good overview for the casual reader!

I was bought a book called “An Utterly Impartial History of Britain (or 200 years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)” by John O’Farrell. It’s some 587 pages long and worried me greatly. But, one night I gave it a go and found that it was one of the hardest books to put down.

It is a book filled with excellent information, particularly the history you were never taught, which makes it much more enjoyable to read. Thinking about it now, the concept that this might be an old school textbook in disguise was probably what made me so aprehensive, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. In addition to all the excellent information, which had something of a patriotic disdain for the country, if that’s possible, is a great wealth of fun. O’Farrell makes personal comments on his findings as he goes along, which is what made the book so interesting for me, as well as a little jokes rippling through to keep the duller histories lively.

The book, as is expressed in the title, revives the last two millenia of British history by bringing back the best and worst of each era. O’Farrell writes frankly with no fear of unveiling the controversial. He talks of what Britain went through and how it was shaped, including our ongoing relationship with the French and more modern relationship with the rest of Europe and, more recently of course, America. It is an excellent read and one I thoroughly recommend.

You can find the book on Amazon here: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)

While idly browsing on YouTube, I found this great video by a professor at Nottingham University. He discusses the recent creation of Element 114, which has since been called Ununquadium, by accelerating and fusing Calcium with Plutonium. The existence of the atom has been indirectly observed 80 times now through inspecting the evidence of its decay. All this you can find in the usual places on the web.

I was very pleased to find that youtube isn’t just used by illiterate people abusing each other in the comments section of various pop videos, but also by academics, researchers and anyone else with a curiosity of the world around them. This particular man seems to be a legend in the making with his obsession with ties, academic one-up-manship and of course his hair. It’s funny that so many university lecturers choose to sport the crazy-scientist hair do, elevating their status in the academic society, while it was born of men who had better things to be doing with their time than fussing over their appearance.

Going back to the discovery of the new element, I was slightly alarmed to find that after eight days of continuous acceleration and impacts, the establishment found evidence of just two Ununquadium atoms. Either way, a remarkable achievement that of course will leave the Americans, Japanese and Europeans trying to find the next semi-stable element in the universe.

YouTube can be amazingly fruitful sometimes. I find it hard to convince the likes of my parents that it’s a resource worth visiting at least occasionally, as it is too well associated with cheap jokes and popular junk. Nonetheless, it has a significant quantity of educational videos, high quality entertainment and interesting video blogs from reputable sources, such as our man here.

Now, back to x-factor.