Tuesday this week was my last day of high school. It was only a half day, but no worked happened, at least not for me anyway. Just before lunch started, someone had set off a fire alarm and the fire department came. Anyway, in the afternoon we had prizegiving practice which was alright. I knew I was getting a prize at that stage, I just didn’t know what for. After that we got to go home. We would have to return later that night for the real thing.

I went out to dinner with my parents before prizegiving. We went to a small steakhouse. I had Beef Teriyaki which was really good. I would be willing to go back there for a meal. After that we made our way to school for the prizegiving. When I got there, I had a look at the booklet they give to the parents to see what I was getting a prize for. My certificate was for Excellence with Diligence in Statistics and Modelling, Merit with Diligence in Electronics and Diligence in ICT. That wasn’t bad I guess. Another part of the prizegiving was the farewell of the year 13′s. For this, the dean read out our names and what we planned on doing next year and we walked across the stage to get our leavers t-shirts. This was this years school t shirt with all the names of the leavers on the back. That was pretty much the night.

The next day, we returned to school for the leavers mass. This was a mass for the year 13′s as well as the year 12′s. On this day, all the year 13′s wore their leavers tshirts to the mass. As well as the mass, there were also pictures and later on some videos of us year 13′s. That was really interesting to see and watch. That would be the last time we all meet together like that. The next time would be when we return our gear and sign out, which will be the last time most of us will see each other.

So now I am done with school. All I have left to do is the 3 exams I have in a weeks time. After that, it’s off to University next year. Goodbye Kavanagh College, it was nice having you for the past 7 years.

Our last unit in Electronics at school was Robotics. For this, we got to use the Lego NXT robots and program them to do different things. This was the unit most people were looking forward to because it means we can play with robots, Lego, not learn any theory and it was a very easy standard to achieve. There were many different robots, all built differently, that all did different tasks. Most of these robots did obvious things like Line Following, Object Avoidance, Light Sensing and such.

The one me and my robot partner, Martin decided to do was the Line Following Robot. it seemed like a simple enough one to do and shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After doing the starting paperwork, we then got given one of the Robot Kits. Lucky for us it was already pre-built so we didn’t have to make it from scratch. This allowed us to quickly getting into the adding of sensors and the programming. The annoying thing about the robots was the software used for programming them. It was a flowchart based language which was really annoying, and even painful due to the really slow lab machines. But it wasn’t too long till we hard a nearly working robot. After some minor tweaks in the power levels, we have a fully functioning line following robot.

Because we did that so fast, our Electronics teacher made us an “extension course.” The original course was a curvy lined course, which was pretty simple to achieve, but the advanced course had sharp angles in it, which required different programming techniques and such to get around it. After a bit of fiddling around with code, we couldn’t get anywhere near getting it to work on the new course. In theory, our ideas would work, but in practice, weird things happened. It just never seemed to work. It required some more thinking and different approaches.

After looking at some other robots on YouTube, I came up with the idea of adding a 3rd sensor onto the robot. This still didn’t work, but we did once get it to go around over half of the extension track, but it struggle on some of the angles over 90 degrees. This is when we admitted defeat. Unfortunately when messing around with the new course, we seemed to have lost out curvy lined program that we needed for the assessment. We managed to modify one of the 3 sensor codes to work with the curvy line.

Some of the other cool robots was another pair that made a line following robot. It also went around the curvy line but it hopped around instead of going around more smoothly. My friend Aaron made a light sensing robot which found the darkest place in the room and went there. This worked alright, but it was pretty average. My other friend Morgan made a Collision Avoidance Robot (again,) but this time with the Lego Kit. His seemed to have trouble at times which it strangling itself and hitting into things. Another pair did this same robot except took a different approach. It worked pretty well and looked cool. There was also a completely original robot that another pair made, and it was put on a table and avoided falling off the edge.

Making the robots and programming them was really awesome, and it was really great to see other peoples ideas and robots doing the same, and other tasks. This was definitely the best part of the year because robots a the best! Now all that I have to do is finish the paperwork for the standard so I can get my credits for this unit. I wish I had some spare money lying around so I could get some robots, I love playing with these things!

Over the past few days, I seem to have been struck with a bit of bad luck. I seem to have the worst luck with computers at times, but it is not normally a group of things going bad in the space of a couple of days. This time it has been overwritten files, disappearing files, corrupt files, and closing unsaved files. Where to start..?

First off, in Electronics we are programming our Lego robots. We had been trying many different approaches at trying to tackle a second problem after easily accomplishing the first task. During all this mess, we had left all our programs unsorted in the default directory that the programming software saved to. We were shuffling around with so many versions of code we hadn’t organized this well by keeping the default untiltled-1 filename. Anyway, for some reason our original program for the assessment of the first task went missing, and the closest thing that would work needed a bit of modification. When we went to the computer to get it, it wasn’t right. Somehow, someone else got access to the computer and managed to overwrite our working program. After a lot of hunting for it, I did manage to find a similar, modified version which I has to remodify to get it to work again. This was a huge hassle.

The next morning when I booted up my comptuer and launched Firefox, it didn’t do what it usually does. I was expecting it to launch and load up my 15 or so tabs from last session. But for some reason it just loaded with an empty tab, empty bookmarks toolbar, empty bookmarks and history in fact. All this had gone and all I had was a 6kb bookmarks html file and those bookmark backups Firefox does automatically. I first tried to restore them, but all I got was an error. It seemed like I had lost around 3 years worth of bookmarks. I needed to get them back but i didn’t have time to try then and there. Later on in the afternoon, I tried to see if there was anything that Recuva could find. I had no luck there. I decided to go to Google with my problem but it didn’t help me much. I tried to restore from backup one more time without luck. I decided to Google the error I got and this time I got lucky. It turns out my backups couldn’t restore because the sqlite database was corrupt. After deleting these files from my profile, the restore worked and I was once again left with my huge collection of bookmarks. I didn’t have any of my history, which is disappointing, especially since the Awesome Bar ain’t so awesome without history, but at least I have my bookmarks, which is a huge relief.

But wait, there’s more! I was doing an assessment in ICT at school in spreadsheets, worth 5 credit (ones that will come in handy I my add.) This is the last one of the course and I was zooming through it. I had one more task to do which was a write up with instructions on how to use the spreadsheet I created. After copying a similar task from another assessment and spending a good amount of time changing it to match what I was doing, I acidentally printed the wrong instruction list and closing without saving the new one that I had done. All I was left with was the wrong thing printed and a blank document where the correct copy should have been. Now I had to redo it again, which I did very sloppy because I could’t be bothered spending all that time repeating it again.

All these problems could have been easily prevented, or files resored ithout hassle if I was better organised and had good backups of my work. This would mean I’d have the original code for my robot, I’d have a backup html copy of my Firefox bookmarks, and I’d still have that good instruction document for my assessment. Anyway, everything turned out fine but it was a bit of an inconvenience and a huge shock. There is nothing worse that the feeling of when you lose important data on your computer.

About a month ago, I noticed that when I moved my laptop from my desk over to my bed, the screen would flash and the light around the power plug on my laptop would flash as well. This means that to power was getting disconnected while I was moving my machine. I initially thought this was just the plug coming loose on my laptop, but once when I was watching to make sure it didn’t come out, the power still cut off. I wiggled the cord a bit and that caused it to flash. Something here was not right.

After a bit of investigation the next morning, I figured that the little cord going into the adapter for my laptop was breaking the circuit if you moved it. The wire or something was loose and it was causing my computer screen to flash everytime the power got disconnected. I needed to do something to stop this from happening so I got some tape to try and stop it. I also started treating the adapter very fragile. This was a temporary fix and I was hoping it would last till I got a new laptop (MacBook please ) next year. Here is a picture of the first fix.

It lasted close to a week before it started happening again. This time it was worse. It was harder to stop it from disconnecting. I tried to tape it back up again but after half a dozen attempts as that, the tape couldn’t keep the circuit closed. After a lot of thinking, a somehow managed to get it to work using 2 clips. That worked well enough to work although it seemed like it was a very very temporary solution. Here is a picture of the second fix.

Today I went into town to find a replacement adapter. I ended up going to Dick Smith Electronics and getting a random third party notebook adapter. This was a well overpriced $149. I didn’t particularly want to spend any money on fixing this machine because it would cost a good $1000 to fix everything up so it is at a usable standard for next year, but at that price, I’d be better off getting a whole new laptop. Anyway, I didn’t use my money to get this so I didn’t mind that much.

I was a bit hesitant to use this adapter after I got it. I was worried it would ruin my laptop. Thanks to a “friend” on an IRC server I am on, she told me her horror story which made me even more hesitant to use it. I eventually just bit the bullet and switched it on and plugged it in and it worked how it should. No problems or blowing up of my computer (thank god!) I don’t know what I would have done if it ruined my computer, but it would probably be something along the lines of getting a cheap $1500 Windows laptop. It’s a shame that this adapter is so ugly, otherwise I wouldn’t mind using it so much. In saying that, I’d rather be able to use my laptop than be without it so I have to compromise on the aesthetics of the adapter. I can’t wait to get my new MacBook. That time can’t come sooner!

My school is fortunate enough to offer Electronics as a subject in year 12 and 13. I did it last year and continued it this year. It is a really cool subject, especially this year because we get to play with Picaxe microcontrollers and Lego robots. The last standard I completed in Electronics was the programming unit. For the Picaxe, we programmed them in basic.

For this project, we get a Picaxe and we make a circuit that we program with the microcontroller. For the standard, you need at least 2 inputs and 2 outputs of any kind. For this, I decided to do a Pedestrian Light simulation. For this, you push a button and it starts the pedestrian lights and then it simulates the traffic lights to stop the cars and shows the light for the person. All the timings are accurate for this simulation and it worked. You can see a video of this here. (Mute video/speakers before playing.) This is my friend Martin’s version of it, which works exactly the same as mine, the only difference being the code and the type of Picaxe used.

Another interesting Picaxe project that I must talk about is that of my friend Morgan’s. He built a Collision Avoidance Robot which is controlled by the Picaxe microcontroller. His program looks far more complex than the Pedestian Light simulation ones and it probably was. The base of the robot was pre-built from some other kit but he added the breadboard with wiring onto it as well as some bumpers to it. When the bumpers get pressed, it gets the robot to turn away. Although it looks simple enough, I can tell you, the construction of the bumpers was quite hard, for some more than others. (Aaron *cough*) A video of the Collision Avoidance Robot he made can be seen here.

Playing with the Picaxe was really awesome and it was really cool to have done a project like this. It was also really cool to see the robot Morgan had made, it was amazing. For a lot of people, this is going to look like child’s play but how many people can actually do this, not many. For me the programming was the best part, I guess I just enjoy trying to solve problems and make little things like this. Next up, its Robotic Lego time

Early this morning, New Zealand time, Steve Jobs took the stage in a special Apple event where he announced a bunch of notebooks. I got up at 6am to read the up to date news on these new systems. As I said during the last event about the new iPods, I find myself less excited and feeling a little disappointed after the announcement. I feel this is not because the products suck or are just minor updates, but because rumors about these are getting released months, weeks, days and hours before the event, and they turn out to be true. I would enjoy the keynote a lot more if the releases were a complete surprise, something i hadn’t seen before, but that seems to be impossible nowadays, unfortunately.

If you want to know about the new MacBooks, you can go to Engadget, MacRumors, Ars Technica or any other tech site that reports on Apple news. If you want the specs and more detailed information, you can go to the Apple website or store for that. They both looks pretty cool and they both are pretty expensive, which is a shame. I had plans on getting a MacBook before, and I still would like a MacBook now. They also announced a 24 inch Cinema Display. The thing that makes this product so special is that it was made for MacBook, Pro and Air. It has 3 cables on it, MagSafe for power, USB for data and Mini DisplayLink for graphics. I think this is a great solution for connecting your notebook to a monitor. It is similar to some kind of docking solution, except with cables. The monitor has power USB ports for those desk items like keyboard, mouse, external drives etc.

The new MacBook is made out of Aluminium instead of plastic. The case looks really nice, much nicer than the previous one in my opinion. The screen is glass and features a LED backlit monitor. It would have been nice if it was capable of 1440×900 instead of just 1280×800. It also has a backlit keyboard on the high end model which is something that I would love because I do type in the dark and have difficulty seeing the in that setting. They have also ditched the Intel integrated graphics with a nVidia GeForce 9400M which is a much better graphics option. I also noticed that it uses DDR3 RAM instead of the DDR2 that most other notebook computers use.

I do love the new MacBook over the old one. The only problem is the increase in price point. The old custom configuration I had would have cost me $2500 with AppleCare and an Educational Discount. My new custom configuration is going to cost me $3000 with AppleCare and Educational Discount. I’m starting to wonder if a $3000 notebook computer is a smart thing to do. Should I just give it a skip and go with a cheaper Windows PC? I really want this MacBook but I’m not sure if I could do it for $3000. Only time will tell if and when I own this beauty…

Last week was mock end of year exams. This is a chance for us to sit the papers we are going to be doing at the end of the year in exam conditions. These run for the whole week and you only have to be there when you have an exam. I only had 3 subjects with exams and two were on the same day, so I only had to show up for 2 days, one being Monday and the other Wednesday. I was lucky enough to get a nice long 4 day weekend.

My first exam was on Monday afternoon and it was for Geography. We only had to do 2 papers, one for skills and the other for cultural processes. I spend most of the 2 hours allocated doing the skills paper thoroughly but didn’t even write my name on the second paper because I couldn’t be bothered writing lots, and I couldn’t remember anything because I didn’t do any study.

And on Wednesday I had one exam in the morning, which was Statistics, and another one in the afternoon, which was Physics. I hadn’t studied for either of them so I knew I wouldn’t do that well. The Stats papers were relatively straight forward, with the Probability paper being the most difficult of the three. In Physics, I was completely lost. I had no idea what I was doing and knew as soon as I looked through the papers I was screwed. I still tried to answer as many questions as I could in case I could fluke a grade.

Well today i got my results back from all my exams. For the Geography paper I did do, I got an Excellence for it, which was well above the expected Achieved/Merit I would have expected. In Stats, I managed to get once of each, an Achieved, Merit and Excellence for each of the papers. In Physics, I flat out failed! This is what you get when you do absolutely no study. Although I justify the lack of study for having other priorities, my reading log assignment which is due in a few days. I will try and study for the real exams and hopefully get good grades in those ones!