Well it’s only taken me a few years to get to version 1.0. I started my Phasecam widget back before Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came out, around January 2005 from what I remember. Last year around Christmas I released a brand new rebuilt version which I did using the beta version of Dashcode. Well this year as a small Christmas present for my fellow Mac OS X users here is 1.0, and in true christmas style as per last years post here is a shot from Pushkin Square in Russia.

Whats New:

• Completely new Javascript.
• Links checked and fixed, some removed and new ones added.
• More Update options.
• Updated looks and Phasenoise logos.
• Smaller Download

Merry Christmas!

Grab it from the downloads section or click here

About a week or so before my wedding my good old HD which was a Toshiba drive which came pre-installed in my PowerBook started to show the old age death signs, it wasn’t much of a surprise as I had noticed quite a few bad blocks showing up on the disc and a general increase in noise from the drive. I can’t recall the model of the drive but it was a nice 80-Gig drive running at 5400 rpm and with a massive 16 megabyte cache, overall I was very happy with this drive, I use my machine for roughly 8 to 12 hours a day and over a period of 3 years the drive has never caused any problems. Even with the drive making odd gestures it still wasn’t really missing a beat, but like many things it’s best to take note of the signs and do something about it before the end.

I needed a replacement drive and looked in to the 100 gig version of the drive only to find out that it had been discontinued. I did some looking and my only real options seemed to be drives from Hitachi and Seagate, the Seagate drives were described as being much quieter so I went for the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 drive. As the model name indicates this is a 7200 rpm drive and I have noticed the speed boost.

Overall I was quite happy with the new drive apart from a loud ticking noise, I did some digging around and found out that this noise is related to the APM (Acoustic Power Management) built in to the drive, this tick that APM causes happens roughly every 20 to 30 seconds, this doesn’t sound too bad at first until you dig a little deeper, every tick and the Hard drives Load_Cycle_Count is incremented by 1, so roughly 69 Cycles an hour. The drives life span is rated at 600,000 cycles. At my current usage rate this drive isn’t gonna live too long.

Please note that this isn’t an isolated case either, this is known to Seagate and it’s not just Seagate that seam to have the problem, Toshiba drives fitted to MacBooks like Louisa’s also have high Load_Cycle_Counts Hitachi are also suffering with these problems. The cause of the problem is that the drive makers are setting the default APM values to the most aggressive value, the Operating System of the machine will normally set these values to a more moderate setting when booted up. There are however some systems that do not change these settings Mac OS X being one of them. So from this we can see there is no person that can correctly be blamed for this mess.

All I can really say is thankgod for Timemachine :) I guess I will just have to use the drive till one day in the future when it pings once too many. If your using a PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro etc… then get hold of the smartmontools from sourceforge and check out your load cycles!

I know I haven’t posted any photos or any other stuff recently. The reason for the lack of photos and stuff is I have been having computer trouble which I’m trying to get sorted. If you have some photos let me know or send me a CD/DVD with them on it. It will have to wait as I’m waiting for a new Superdrive for my PowerBook to turn up at this very moment. We do have quite a few photos already that I will sort out and post up as soon as my machine is in a fit state to be used properly.