Category Archives: Computers

A rather rambling update

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It has been a while since I have posted here – so here goes:

  • Added a few new birds to my life list – most notably a pair of Bush Stone-curlews (Burhinus grallarius) seen on the road to East Intercourse Island in Dampier in the middle of the night (I was on night shift, not going for a midnight twitch);
  • Work on my British N Gauge model railway is progressing well (tunnels are under construction, some buildings have been added). The locomotive and rolling stock collection is growing also (I have three Graham Farish locomotives: a Class 08, a Class 31 and a Class 37);
  • I seem to be continually adding Macs (in particular iMacs) to the collection – thanks Alex! Thankfully I have a shed…
Edit: Changed Beach Stone-curlew to Bush Stone-curlew after consultation with experts.

Hot rod 7500

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I have finally finished building (I think) my hot rod Power Mac 7500.  It has:

  • 256MB of RAM (using 4 of the 8 slots in case I find some more 64MB sticks);
  • An IBM 18GB SCSI disk;
  • A PowerLogix PowerForce G3 350/175/512K G3 (Spartan) upgrade card running at 300MHz;
  • A fairly generic USB 1.1 PCI card;
  • An Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T PCI card;
  • An iXMicro Ultimate Rez Twin Turbo 128 PCI graphics card;
  • An AppleVision 1710 Display.
Everything else (floppy and CD drive) is stock.  It runs Mac OS 8.6 like lightning.

Playing Chess

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I have started to play chess again (for the first time in many years). I am not very good at it but I am keen to learn and find it intellectually stimulating. At the moment I am playing against the computer but I may play against real people (online) at some point. I purchased some basic chess books as my Christmas present and am slowly working my way through them.

For some reason I have always been intrigued by the game. Grandad and Grandma Howell gave us a really nice wooden set when we were younger (I have it in the shed) and Chris and I would sometimes play games. From memory he would usually beat me…

At the moment I am just playing the version of Chess that ships with Mac OS X. I have installed Deep Green (by Joachim Bondo) on the Newton 2100. I will be having a look at Glaurung as well.

Mission Accomplished

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I have finally finished re-building my PowerBook G4 12″ (1GHz). I have upgraded the hard drive (40GB to 160GB), replaced the broken combo drive (got one cheap off eBay) and upgraded the operating system (10.4 to 10.5).

To others considering a similar mission:
  • The hard drive is much easier to replace than the optical drive;
  • The 160GB 5400 RPM Western Digital Scorpio disk runs warmer than the stock disk (to be expected really *);
  • Remember where all the screws came from (I didn’t);
  • Use the right tools for the job;
  • There are a few service manuals available on the web. Use them.
I can’t really justify a new laptop at the moment. I think these upgrades have extended the life of my old one a bit longer.

* Edit: this may be due to the fact that the original disk was 4200 RPM.

Thousands of tiny screws…

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The 12″ PowerBook G4 is a real pain to take apart. I am in the process of replacing the HDD and optical drive and you have to strip the PowerBook down completely. Everything from the motherboard up needs to be removed before you can extract the optical drive. The HDD is only marginally easier to get to.

Anyhow, last night I reached a milestone. I am now putting things back together instead of taking them apart. In all honesty I probably have another 6 hours of tinkering to do.

The end result will be a very usable PowerBook with a working optical drive and a 160GB HDD. I think it’s worth it…