Category: Computers

A friend of mine gave me a bunch of computer hardware yesterday (yeah, like I need more junk) and in the assorted bits of hard drive and floppy drives are a bunch of Macintosh parts. Now I have a few USB keyboards, parts for an old iMac, a Quadra 700 (aww, so cute!), and best of all a working beige G3/266!
I think that I’m going to try and upgrade the memory in it (take from the other PPC Macs I have) and sling a 20 GB hard drive on it (it has an IDE bus in it). Should be faster than my original FrankenMac as the backplane bus speed it like 60 and not 40MHz. I’ll keep everyone up to date on my progress.

Ballmer: We need a $100 PC
I think Ballmer needs a reality check, that’s what I think. If he thinks that someone in Thailand will buy a USD$100 PC and then fork over USD$300 for a copy of non-crippled Office he is living in some strange land where relaity takes a back seat to market logic. I’ll tell you exactly what they will do. The PC will be bought and then fitted out with pirated software that costs the buyer only USD$5 a CD. The money that could have been spent on a legal copy of that software will be then spent on non-Microsoft things like food, rent, clothing etc… Come on Ballmer, the average income in a place like Thailand is about USD$7,400! That would make your full version of Office equilivent to $1400 in the US dollars.

I have a use for my FrankenMac, it make s anifty web server with PHP. Now if only my ISP would allow a webserver to run on the Internet things would be great. I just want to use it to test stuff before I send it off to this page. But, as it would cause the end of the world as we know it, Cox has decided to block all port 80 and 8080 traffic. I guess they want to make you get a business account if you actualy want to do something other than surf the web and read email. Idiots… I liked Qwest,you could do things like experement with servers and such. You wern’t treated like a child that didn’t know any better…
Whatever.
Cox wo baka desu!

***PONGMECHANIK***
Wow, a fully electromechanical Pong game. He uses relay logic to run the entire thing. The video is a must see.

I like old computers…. Yeah, I know, who dosen’t? Because of this I have managed to collect quite a few of the old critters. Most collect dust and occasionaly get used to play around with the old OS (remember system 6?) and a few apps. However, as I discovered a program called ‘XPostFacto‘ that will let you cram OSX onto an old Mac.
One of my old computers is a 7300/133. Its a big ugly beige desktop unit that is about as low as you can go when going the upgrade route for using Apple’s latest OS.
I started buy buying 512 MB of memory for it from an online store. I read that you can use as little as 128, but I know that the more RAM you have better life is. While I was waiting for the memory to arrive I picked up a G3 card from eBay.
Next was to try and load 10.0.2 on to a 2 GB hard drive. Can’t do it. Just won’t fit.
So I was stuck for a while, the 7300 only supports SCSI drives and 2 GB was as large I had around the house.
Even after a trip to a computer swapmeet the best I could find for less than $10 was a 4GB drive, that allowed me to at least load some of the OS. After mucking about with settings and deleting of files and moving things about I realized that 4GB was just too small. I needed more space.
Ebay to the rescue once again. Found a dandy 9.1 GB drive with adapter for $30. Nifty!
Reloaded the OS once again and what do you know, everything went smooth. So now I have a Mac running OSX (unix) just waiting for me to find a purpose for it. I can use my USB and Firewire PC cards in it, so that quite nice. It should make a fine email machine…