life’s a beach and then you die
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first thing to be placed in the first bin liner of a new roll is the paper the new roll of bin liners were wrapped in.
And in other news, I went mad and ripped the CD writer module out of my terribly expensive Lacie firewire CD writer, and put it in my frighteningly cheap Firewire and USB caddy.
And now I can burn CDs over USB on my old 233mHz RevA iMac!
I really should have my own page on Lowendmac, you know…
It’s a �20 Firewire and USB enclosure for a 5.25″ hard disk, CD writer or DVD writer.
Amazingly it comes with two different kinds of Firewire leads and a USB lead, plus a screwdriver. You don’t even get a USB lead with some printers costing 4 or 5 times as much.
I put my RevA iMac’s old hard drive in the enclosure, screwed it together, powered it up and plugged it in to the iMac’s own USB 1.0 socket - it’s running OS 10.3 - and my old iMac’s hard drive appeared on the desktop, so I can get any data off that I forgot to transfer.
It’s a bit noisy (so’s my expensive Lacie FW hard drive) and a bit ugly, but for �30 all in, who cares?!
We’ve been trying to think of names - and I’ve been also thinking of the great song ‘The Name Game’ by Shirley Ellis (1965, apparently).
When I was about 10 or 11 I was inordinately fond of that song, and I remember going as far as writing out the logic (if not actually writing the code) for a computer program that would play the Name Game for any name you typed in.
For those of you who don’t know the song, here’s a sample:
Shirley!
Shirley, Shirley, Bo Birley
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Firley
Fee, Fy, Mo Mirley
Shirley
Now here in 2005 I thought that The Name Game would make a grand RealBasic project.
But someone’s already done it in JavaScript!
All togther now…
Henry!
Henry, Henry, Bo Benry
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Fenry
Fee, Fy, Mo Menry
Henry!
Okay then, how about this:
William!
William, William, Bo Billiam
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Filliam
Fee, Fy, Mo Milliam
William!
Curses, is there no catching them out?!
Perpetua!
Perpetua, Perpetua, Bo Berpetua
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Ferpetua
Fee, Fy, Mo Merpetua
Perpetua!
Apparently not.
Well installing OS 10.3 on my half-dead RevA iMac was someting of a breeze.
First, remember, I’d installed a bigger hard drive - I really don’t think that the 4 gig drive that shipped with the original iMac is going to be enough for running OS X and having much useful software, let alone any actual data. So Jon Ward very kindly gave me an old 20 gig iMac hard drive he had replaced for a bigger one for someone else. But hey, 20 gigs is five times bigger than what I had before, and twice what my 2001 iBook has. Even in OS 9 I noticed the machine ran faster and quieter (possibly because the disk was less fragmented).
Then I partitioned the new drive in OS 9. making sure that the 1st partition was smaller than 8 gigs - this is essential on early iMacs due to some weird limitation in the IDE interface.
I then checked my iMac’s firmware was up-to-date. This is essential - installing OS X on a machine with the wrong firmware can, I believe, be terminal. Firmware up-to-date, off we go, installing OS 10.3 on the small 8 gig partition.
And here I am, typing this in Safari running on a RevA 233 mHz iMac. OS X seems really quite snappy - I’ve not fired up any serious applications yet, but the Finder works better than it did in OS 10.0 on my 500mHz iBook. My cruddy old Elonex VGA monitor is happy with 800×600 at 60Hz - 800×600 is the lowest resultion you can practically use OS X at. Believe me. I’ve tried it at 640×480 and you can’t even see the bottom of many dialogue boxes in Sytem Preferences.
Using an old Apple microphone Vlod gave me years ago, I’ve even fired up Skype, with mixed results. Only spoken to our Estonian friend Echo123 so far, and it was very choppy. Perhaps 233mHz isn’t enough for Skype, and I know I won’t be doing any video editing on this machine. But here are some things I can do:
- develop and serve web pages using Apache
- run MacMAME games (I hope!)
- Henry can paint using TuxPaint
- If I install X11 I can run free software like Gimp
- Browse the web using Safari and Firefox
- Print on my Samsung laser printer
- Use my HP scanner - at last!
- Sync my phone and my Palm using iSync
- ooooh just oodles more stuff
Jon Ward very kindly gave me a 20 gig hard drive out of an old family iMac to replace the 4 gig one on my FrankenMac (it’s a RevA 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac with a fried flyback transformer and a grody old Elonex VGA monitor glued on to it).
I have a service manual for the iMac somewhere, but that was way too easy - instead I drank half a bottle of red wine and set to it with my screwdriver set.
Well it’s more fun that way. More of a challenge.
Some may tell you that the iMac was designed by Jonathan Ive. I say it was designed by a sadistically warped sadist. It is insanely difficult to get inside, as I remember from when I added more RAM years ago. Nice to see that the Mezzanine slot really was labelled ‘mezzanine’, though.
I ended up completely removing the motherboard - possibly needlessly - but eventually I prised the caddy holding the hard drive out, swapped it and put it all back together. Ok, the CD-ROM drive doesn’t fit perfectly anymore, but I can fix that later.
Remembering that RevA iMacs must have the 1st HD partition no bigger than 8 Gigs, I booted off an OS 9 install disc and partitioned the disk. I was a bit puzzled to find rather large ‘unused portions’ cropping up - almost 1 Gig when I manually typed in 8000 MB as the 1st partition size. Dragging the lines on the partition map proved more fruitful, though - I could get my 1st partiton to just inder 8000 MB and minimize the wasted space.
And here I am now, running OS 9.2 as before, only now with more than 5 times the hard disk space I had before.
Next step - OS 10.3… better check my firmwware’s up to date, snicker snicker, or it’s good night Cupertino.
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