Mac-o-rama

I picked up an old-ish iMac at the MIT Swapfest recently, for $100. It's a 400 MHz G3 iMac, intended for Barb to use as her own computer. After scrounging up more RAM and a less-noisy hard drive, it was good to go.

The Mac OS was a bit of a problem. It came with OS X, but no disks. So I actually bought a copy of OSX 10.3 and did a clean install. Next problem - a lot of the kids games work under OS 9 and below. Luckily, OSX supports a "classic" mode that runs OS9 in sort of a virtual machine. So I found a copy of OS 9.0 on eBay for $10. Installed that. Then had to go to the Apple site and download the OS 9.1 update. Installed that. Then I had to download the 9.2 update. etc, etc. After about a half-dozen installs I finally had a working OSX with a working OS9. And now the games run.

Since Macs seem to be USB/Firewire printable only, I set up network printing through my Win2K and Linux machine, so we can share the same old HP Deskjet printer. The Win2k setup was a pain, and required installing Ghostscript among other things, but the Linux network printing worked without any effort whatsoever. The Mac just automatically found the Linux print server.

I'm not in love with the Mac GUI. But you gotta love those drop-shadows on the windows. I need to get the KDE patch to replicate that on my Linux machines.
Jim on 07.16.05 @ 01:19 PM ET [link]

Carbon

I finally got fed up with my $40 Lexar MP3 player and went and bought a 5 GB Rio Carbon player. After rebate, I got it for a song (so to speak). Its main advantages are:

• It's not an Apple iPod


• It has 5 GB of storage, more than an iPod mini


• Can charge its internal Li-Ion battery off of USB


• Tiny size


• It has proper bookmarks


• It's not an Apple ipod

Did I say it's not an Apple iPod?
Jim on 07.14.05 @ 08:22 PM ET [link]

Finally, a post

I haven't posted in so long here that I feel a little guilty. Well, here it is.
A post, I mean.

OK.

Well.
Carry on.
Jim on 07.04.05 @ 01:05 PM ET [link]