First, just pry off the two plastic tabs attaching the fan.

Second… you are pretty much done! The copper inside curves around the inside to spread heat out from the base, but now it can spread the heat off your hot soldering iron as well. If it doesn’t support your iron well, you could easily drill a hole for the tip to rest in and hold it in place.

I decided today (and yesterday) would be a good days to clean up my car. One thing I really wanted to do is get rid of the ugly wax stains and dirt in the trim of my car. The trim is textured and its sort of porous, so in the past when I was careless it would absorb wax and gunk…

Heres the drivers door yesterday before I got started.

You can see the white spots where wax hit it and dried up. Mothers back to black would just mask it but would not get it out.

Heres todays result. Shiny, smooth, and the trim is flawless. The only thing I have used on it is JIF Peanut Butter rubbed in with a latex glove, then wiped off with paper towels. I was shocked at how much stuff the peanut oils were lifting out of the trim, as the paper towels were disgusting when I finished.

Heres a daylight picture.

Peanut butter oil proves to be an ideal cleaner. It does not harm paint, it is easily washed away, and it does not cover up the stains, it actually removes them. If you have stubborn stains on any sort of porous trim, try PB!

So I had to find a new victim. That victim, is my Macbook Pro. Being in school means I don’t have the spare change for a SSD, I decided to look for more disk performance elsewhere. This is where I started to make the most out of what I already had.

My victims:

1x iogear Expresscard 34 2x e-SATA adapter.

1x Acomdata 500gb eSATA hard drive (Contains a WD Greenpower drive)

I had bought these to use with Time Machine as a way to back up all my files in case something goes terribly wrong (it has) and now as a mean of faster disk transfer. But it was hardly faster than my 7200rpm laptop drive, so what do I do now? I go back to my desktop ways, and make a RAID array.

I opened up Disk Utility and created a small partition one each disk. I then dragged each partition into the array, until I encountered my first problem.

Disk utility won’t let you drag internal partitions into a RAID array. I wasn’t going to let my quest for the stupidest RAID array ever conceived end here, so I kept on fighting. With a little googling and a lot of head scratching, I finally found my answer.

diskutil.

This little terminal command doesn’t discriminate, and would lead me to success.

First type diskutil list into a terminal window, and this will give you the identifiers for the next step.

You can see the disk I need, noted as disk0s5 and disk1s3. Now for step two.

sudo diskutil appleRAID create stripe LOLRAID HFS+ /dev/disk0s5 /dev/disk1s3

You can change stripe to mirrored, but this whole concept is pretty stupid, and I don’t see why you would. You can probably change stripe size too, but this isn’t important for this particular experiment.

It worked. Lets see what Disk Utility has to say.

Right now Disk Utility isn’t looking too tough compared to its terminal brother. Lets see some benchmarks!

On the first is the internal drive, the middle is the RAID, and the last is the external. Its pretty clear that a standard desktop hard drive in an external enclosure is still victorious, but maybe stripe sizes being set to the default 32kb had some impact.

IN CONCLUSION:

Good idea? No.

Did it work? Yes.

Was it worth it to pair up two entirely different drives through two interfaces, just to have some really cool RAID action going on? Definitely.