Another season of 24 has started, and it is just as addictive as the rest. I don’t know how they continue to come up with such gripping stories, but I sure do love it. I find that 24 is best watched without commercials, much like a movie. And, naturally, the latest episodes are all over the net now for your pre-edited enjoyment.

While working on a small audio project, I dicovered this Easter egg on a microphone preamp board out of an old Mac. Printed on the back of the board is “©1992 Apple Computer” — text you’d expect to find on any piece of Apple hardware of that date. However, you’ll notice that the letter L in Apple is the so-called “Jesus fish” symbol seen on vehicles nearly everywhere in the country. The sybolism has been around, on car bumpers at least, since the 1980s (credit to my girlfriend for finding out this fact). So, it’s entirely possible that someone slipped this into the circuit silkscreen before the boards went into production. I wonder what the real story is…

While I’m on the topic of adapters, here’s one I just made that allows Xbox peripherals to be connected to a computer. Right now, the two main items are memory cards and the Xbox Communicator headset, both of which have drivers for Windows available. Hopefully, some kind soul will put together a Mac driver for the headset, as I’d like to be able to use it with Skype (otherwise, yet another adapter is in order to make use of the standard audio plug alone). See more images at Flickr, including a shot of the simple electrical connections.

Back when Command-Tab first started, I did a hack where I managed to connect a full size hard drive to a 3G iPod. I’m happy to present today a much easier solution — the “iPod Junior” — using a laptop hard drive and a nearly pre-built adapter. The end result is an iPod with an attached 2.5″ hard drive with next to no soldering.

In my earlier hack, I noted that the 1.8″ hard drive inside the iPod runs on 3.3v (see for yourself) instead of the 5v used in slightly larger laptop drives. Again, some external power source will need to be connected to power the drive, as the iPod alone can’t even spin up the laptop drive, much less a full desktop-sized drive. What I discovered is that the hard drive caddy inside IBM ThinkPad 240 laptops are almost a perfect iPod-to-laptop drive adapter, with the exception of power. On the front of the adapter is a female 1.8″ hard drive plug normally used for connecting to the laptop bus, and on the back is a standard female laptop hard drive connector. With some slight modification to route in the correct power, this modified adapter can easily attach a laptop hard drive to your iPod’s ribbon cable — ready for formatting and use.

You can see more photos of the modification in my Flickr photoset. To do the hack yourself, you’ll need to acquire a ThinkPad 240 hard drive caddy off eBay, like I did. Cut the +3.3v power trace that leads to pins 41 and 42 on the 2.5″ hard drive bus, and also scrape some of the green coating off both positive and ground traces. With the positive lines cut and some bare copper exposed on both traces, you can then solder on whatever power connector you prefer to run 5v to — I used two simple pins from a pin header, as a floppy drive power connector will easily plug onto them. From there, connect everything up, power up the drive, and then the iPod. Format and use. Rinse and repeat.

1/20/06 Update
Get it while it’s hot - a ThinkPad 240 HD caddy on eBay.