With all the changes going on around here, I decided to do a little house cleaning and did away with a couple sub-domains which housed various projects. One of these sites was my “widget” site which housed my creations for Apple’s Dashboard application. Out of all the widgets posted there, only one was still drawing traffic.

My Travel Bug widget is basically the same search feature found on the main Geocaching web site, albeit in a much smaller form. You can search for geocaches using a variety of methods including zip code, cache name, city, state, etc.

I unfortunately haven’t had an opportunity to go geocaching in quite some time and therefor don’t frequent the main website anymore. Should any users come across an issue with this widget and how it interacts with the site, please leave a comment and I will update it as needed.

Download The “Travel Bug” Widget

Santa brought me this really awesome LED gas gauge to replace the stock one on my Harley-Davidson Street Bob. I already had the matching gas cap, which I won at one of the local monthly H.O.G. meetings.

The blue lights in the teeth extinguish one by one until only the one on the far left remains – then it turns red to warn you of your low fuel level. You can view a larger photo for the maximum amount of awesome.

Web sites like these have flooded the widget seeking community with some really stellar offerings… and some real pieces of shit as well. After well over a month of growing and pruning my collection of these widgets I feel that I have a pretty nice setup which I utilize several times a day. Below is a screen shot of my dashboard (click for a larger view) along with a listing of what they are.

Calendar, iCal Events, Flip Clock, Calculator, Stocks, Weather, Google Maps, FTP Drop, Stickies, ShortStat, Airport Radar, Capture, TinyWorld, Translation, RabbitRadio, Black ‘n’ Blue, Delicious Library

Out of curiosity, I asked around for some other opinions on the subject. Dwayne sent me a screen shot of his (below) where he likes to have the words “balls” and “fuck” available for immediate viewing.

The photo above shows my PowerMac minus an optical drive. Figuring out how to get the stock SuperDrive out was a challenge in itself. That was until I realized it helped if I disconnected it from the Logic Board first. As I found out when adding another hard drive, Apple has the coolest way to plug shit in. Also as with the hard drive, I didn’t have to use any tools to install this thanks to the mounting system they have inside the case.

Just to be clear, I removed the stock SuperDrive which is a Pioneer DVR-106 DVD Burner and replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-109 Dual Layer DVD Burner. You can find these in retail stores (with a slightly different model number) but you will pay about $50 more and get software you don’t need (as it won’t run on your Mac). Instead, head on over to NewEgg and pick up the OEM version of the drive for $60. A couple days later your new SuperDrive will arrive via FedEx.

So as I said before, I had to install this four separate times and I hope you will learn from my time consuming mistakes. First off, before you even put the screw slides in the bottom of the drive, you need to get a thick paper clip and put it in the small hole on the front of the drive to manually eject it. Doing so will allow you to take off the front “lip” off the tray. This lip is to big and will catch on the PowerMac’s case. Secondly, don’t forget to put the metal clip around the front of the drive like the one had when you took it out. A stupid mistake, I know, but when you are excited you miss things like this. Lastly, and this one I remembered about in advance, don’t forget to reset the jumpers on the back of the drive. You want to put it on the third set for “Cable Select”

My last recommendation is if you have access to a PC, install it in to it first and upgrade the firmware. For some reason, even though you have to do absolutely nothing to this drive to get it to run on OS X (I am using OS 10.4 Tiger), Pioneer does not support this drive running on a Mac and there for has no way to flash it. If you decide to do the firmware upgrade as I did, it will bump it to version 1.4.

After you do that, put it back into your PowerMac, plug everything back in and boot up. You won’t even notice the drive is different as the transition is seamless. I tested it out with iTunes first and it alerted me that my preferred drive (Pioneer DVR-106) was not available and if I would like to use the available burner (Pioneer DVR-109). The one thing that you will notice is the speed difference. This optical drive is so much faster and if you do a lot of burning, that is a big plus. The volume of the drive is the same so I didn’t notice any changes there.

If anyone has any questions on removing and installing or configuring a new SuperDrive go ahead and leave a comment below. I’ll be happy to answer any questions I can.