All's quiet on the western front...

Not much going on at the moment that's worth writing up about.

Got the Golf working, and so far there haven't been any problems with the coilpack repair. I'll keep an eye out for a MkIV coilpack on eBay, as I'm sure it's going to fail sooner or later, but for the time being, it's all good.

Got the Electroluminescent panels working with some mini 12V inverters off eBay - I've now got a soft glow coming from under the bed, so Nadia doesn't walk into the legs of the bed and wake me up, cursing at the top of her lungs ;-)



I've been playing with smartd from the smartmontools package, and while I can't get launchd to start it automatically, as it immediately forks and quits it's parent process (which launchd really doesn't like) I've got an AppleScript, from Mac OS X Hints (with thanks to geppo1982):

Open ScriptEditor and paste the following code:

set mailAddress to "youremailaddress"

set mainDisk to do shell script "mount | grep \" on / \" | cut -d \" \" -f 1"

do shell script "echo " & mainDisk & " -n standby -T permissive -s L/../../7/09 -H -l selftest -l error -f -m " & mailAddress & " | /usr/local/bin/smartd -c - -i 3600"


It appears that geppo1982 has been busy, and created an OS X Installer that installs smartmontools and configures launchd to launch it automatically, plus it will send you a test email when it's first launched. I found with the test email, the first time I ran it, it didn't work, but then the second and subsequent times it did. YMMV.