Archive for the 'hardware' Category

iPod Nano - 4th Generation

Published
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blogmywiki
on October 23, 2008
in Apple and music
. 0 Comments

It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy - and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.

When The Old and the New the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.

I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.

All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…

WiFi forgetfulness solved

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blogmywiki
on September 24, 2008
in Apple and MacOS X
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Following a security update, my PowerBook kept losing its wireless connection when waking from sleep or starting up. Wifi woes solved This was a pain as my WiFi base station doesn’t transmit its SSID and I had to enter its name and long hex WEP key each time I wanted to get online.

Turns out the solution was rather simpler than all the mucking around I’d been doing deleting com.apple.airport files and the like.

I just made a new ‘location’ - its location had been on ‘automatic’, so I went to System Preferences > Network and clicked on the locations drop-down menu and made a new location (called ‘foo’ of course). Since then it’s been rejoining my wireless network ok when it wakes up. Phew! Or should I say ‘Foo!’?

Super-connected

Published
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blogmywiki
on September 23, 2008
in Apple, Uncategorized, Wii, computers and gaming
. 0 Comments

Did a security update on my PowerBook today; now it keeps forgetting my wireless network’s name and password. So it really is very bloody secure as it’s now mostly not connected to the internet at all any more. I forgave this behaviour in a £200 (now defenestrated) Asus eeePC but it’s a bit galling in a £1600 Apple pro laptop. Where’s the window?

Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ Wii Transfer (it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…

LittleBits

Published
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blogmywiki
on September 1, 2008
in hardware
. 0 Comments

These look like fun… thanks to Azfar for sending me this link.


littleBits intro from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.

Big fat hard drive in a 700 MHz G4 iMac

Published
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blogmywiki
on February 18, 2008
in Apple, MacOS X, computers, hardware, lowendmac, operating systems and thrift
. 3 Comments

Conventional wisdom says that any G4 iMac slower than 1 GHz cannot work with a hard drive bigger than 120 GB. But they were selling 320GB IDE drives in Maplin for only £59.99 and it seemed silly to pay ten or twenty quid less for a fraction of the storage - anyhoo if it didn’t work I could always bung the big drive in my USB/Firewire caddy and use it for backing up the backups of my photos…

So I opened up the iMac again, inserted the drive, had considerably more trouble getting it back together this time but got there. Expecting nothing (I thought I’d broken the IDE cable aside from the fact that most web sites said this would not work) I powered up. Bing! Flashing folder, as expected.

Inserted Panther install disc - installer ran but couldn’t find a hard drive. Well fair enough, it’s factory fresh and not formatted, so I used Disk Utility on the Panther install disc to format it as Mac OS X Journalled.

But the installer still wouldn’t install - it found the drive but it had a red warning triangle next to it and the words “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume”.

Game over, I thought. Either the IDE cable is broken or - as people say - the drive is just too big for an old Mac. But before I gave up I had a word with Mr Google (thank you Jamie Oliver) and found this page which told me to give it a reboot. And by jove, he’s right. It’s insane, but he’s right. After a swift kick the installer happily ran and here I am typing this on an ancient 700 MHz G4 iMac that cannot possibly work with a hard drive larger than 120 GB, and yet I have 300 GB free… ah so many things to try… more memory, video editing, installing a DVD burner, keeping all my MP3s, getting all my photos off my PowerBook which has run out of disk space…

look ma! 300GB free!

Repairing a G4 ‘Anglepoise’ iMac

Published
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blogmywiki
on February 17, 2008
in Apple, lowendmac and thrift
. 3 Comments

My son’s school was chucking out a faulty 700 MHz G4 Anglepoise iMac - apprently it had an intermittant fault where the hard drive clicked and it wouldn’t boot. Of course I couldn’t bear to see this become land-fill so I brought it home to my Macintosh Sanctuary.

At first it seemed fine but whilst installing OS X, the thing died. Click, click, click. All I could do was get it to boot into Open Firmware - it wouldn’t even eject the CD-ROM. I was convinced I’d killed it, but a couple of bright sparks at work suggested that the hard drive might have just finally kicked the bucket. As it shares its IDE interface with the CD-ROM drive this might also explain why the CD wouldn’t eject. Armed with some instructions from XLER8YOURMAC, size 10 and 15 Torx (star-shaped) screwdrivers and an old 4GB Bondi Blue iMac hard drive, I explored.

I actually found the whole thing easier than that article suggested. First using a small cross-pointed screwdriver you undo the base plate to get at the user-servicable parts - a memory slot and Airport card slot:

user servicable parts

Then the big Torx T15 screwdriver comes into play - undo the 4 Torx screws and pull the whole base - including the white plastic bit where the ports are. Be gentle but firm as you are unplugging connectors as you do this.

prising open

At this point you can swap its internal memory card if you like, but I was interested in the grey drive assembly. I disconnected its IDE connector on the motherboard and unclipped the 2 cables clamped to its right. Then I used the T10 Torx screwdriver to remove the 6 screws holding the drive assembly in place (click on photo to see notes):

drive assembly

I then pulled the drive assembly down and towards me.

fan and gubbins

I then removed the IDE and power connectors from the hard drive, peeled the strange white plastic wrapper off and removed the IDE drive from its caddy using a Torx screwdriver.

the dead hard drive

I replaced it with a 4 GB hard drive from my original 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac - one tenth the size of the one I removed but this was a temporary measure to prove that this was the problem before I shell out some real money on an 80GB drive. I put it all back together, forgetting the thermal paste for now, and turned it on:

Never so pleased to see OS 9!

I’ve never been so pleased to see the OS 9 splash screen! That old iMac hard drive must have been confused though - it fell asleep in a 233 MHz CRT G3 Bondi Blue iMac and woke up in a 700 MHz LCD G4 anglepoise iMac… I never liked the G4 iMac when it came out, but now I have one I think it’s a great machine. And easier to get inside than the Bondi Blue beastie…

Messages! From Outer space!

Published
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blogmywiki
on January 27, 2008
in Linux, OLPC, Sugar, computers and thrift
. 0 Comments

OLPCI finally got to play with a pukka One Laptop Per Child laptop on Friday. I’d heard sniffy things about it, and indeed I bought an Asus eeePC for myself as you can’t buy the OLPC in the UK. I expected to be unimpressed, but it’s a very nice machine - and the display is brilliant. Turn the backlight off and you get a very, very crisp monochrome display that can be read in direct sunlight. It even folds back on itself to become an ‘ebook’-style tablet. The OLPC and my eeePC made a very sweet couple sitting side-by-side.

I got to play with one thanks to Tom Hannen in the BBC World Service, and good luck to him in trying to get folk there to do something for it - it should be right up the World Service’s street. He’s written a great little Speak and Spell toy for it, and I fancied having a go at writing a simple program myself. So I’ve been messing around with emulators - sadly it’s too slow to be useful on my old Apple G4 PowerBook, but I got it to fairly fly on a WindowsXP laptop which can take advantage of having an Intel / X86 processor.

This is a bit odd, though… check out these weird symbols that appear VERY briefly twice when you shut down the OLPC. It’s like something out of Lost:
olpc warning

Setting the Asus eeePC clock using NTP

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 16, 2008
in Asus eee PC, Linux, Xandros and computers
. 2 Comments


For some mad reason the Asus eeePC doesn’t have any option to set its time and date using an NTP server - not even when running in the advanced desktop mode.

Here’s a quick way to add the function if you are running in advanced mode. You don’t need to install any software - the command line tool you need is called ‘rdate’ and it’s already on your eeePC.

In your advanced desktop, go to the Launch menu, Applications > System > Menu Editor. Expand the Applications list and highlight Utilities. Click on File > New Item.

In the name box type something like ‘Set clock’ and in the Command box enter something like this:

sudo /usr/sbin/rdate ntp2d.mcc.ac.uk

replacing ‘ntp2d.mcc.ac.uk’ with your local NTP server of choice (I picked my alma mater for sentimental reasons rather than geographical proximity…)

Untick the ‘Enable launch feedback’ box and save and close. It should then do some system updates and then you should see a new item in your Launch menu under Applications > Utilities that when you click on it, updates your eeePC’s system clock. Now why couldn’t Asus have just left the NTP option alone in its Xandros version of Linux?

Phew!

Published
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blogmywiki
on January 15, 2008
in Apple, Asus eee PC and computers
. 10 Comments

As an Apple fan who recently bought a tiny Asus eeePC laptop, I was frankly dreading today’s MacWorld Expo. Everyone seemed to be saying that Apple would also be bringing out a tiny laptop too. I could only hope it would cost a shade more than the £200 my Asus cost me.

Well, yes. Just a mere £1000 more than that. You can buy 6 eeePCs for the price of one MacBook Air.

Phew.

Oh, and unlike the eeePC, the MacBook Air has no ethernet socket, no microphone socket and only one USB socket (the eeePC has three). The eeePC weighs 920g to the MacBook Air’s 1.3kg. Both have built-in webcams and microphones. And I don’t see an SD card socket in the Apple gizmo…

I can’t really see who the MacBook Air is aimed at. PowerBook/MacBook Pro users are going to find its lack of connectivity a bit of an issue - I mean what’s the use of iMovie when there’s no freaking Firewire socket? Don’t know about you but none of my camcorders has super-fast wireless connectivity… And most other users are going to choke on the price tag, even if it does have far more storage than my eeePC and a much bigger display. But it’s the small footprint of the eeePC that makes it so appealing to me - I don’t care how thin it is, I just want to be able to rest it inconspicuously on my knee on the train.

TillyPaint on eeePC

Published
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blogmywiki
on December 12, 2007
in Asus eee PC, Linux and Xandros
. 0 Comments

tillypaintI got TillyPaint working on my eeePC - it’s a very simple finger-painting program wot I wrote aimed at very young children. The idea is that you can make a mark without clicking the mouse, which almost all paint programs require you to do. You can find versions of it for MacOS X, Windows and Linux here.

The Linux version isn’t quite right - it clearly doesn’t run full-screen like it should and holding down the shift key doesn’t stop it drawing like it should, but the basic idea works.

To install it, I just downloaded the ZIP to my personal folder, right-clicked on it in the file manager to unzip it then did the same to change its permissions (under properties) to make it excecutable and then launched it by double-clicking on it in the file manager. This is probably a hideous crime against Linux, but then I’m no Linux power-user let alone developer… :-)