Following a security update, my PowerBook kept losing its wireless connection when waking from sleep or starting up. 
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!’?
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…
Memo to self, type post - please ignore if you don’t have a Mac and a Nintendo DS…
You will need:
A Mac running OS X
A Nintendo DS or DS Lite
An M3 card or similar to run Moonshell - the homebrew multimedia player
The excellent, free Mac/Windows MPEG Streamclip to convert your movie to a 15 fps (frames per second) 256 x 192 resolution AVI with MPEG-2 128 kps sound.
You can go command line to convert the movie to a DPG file that Moonshell will play, but much easier to use Mac DPG Converter and Mencoder - make sure you put Mencoder in the same folder as Mac DPG Converter.
And then there we are, enjoying Shaun the Sheep, transferred off the Humax PVR and onto the small screen - 1 episode clocks in at about 9 MB. Perfect for boredom-relieving.
I think I might now know why there are so many unsecured wireless computer networks around.
I could never understand this, it seems so stupid to leave your network wide open. Security is easy enough to set up with MacOS X, a snip with a Nintendo DS - I even managed it using command line tools on a cut-down version of Linux.
Then I tried to get 3 different Windows XP laptops to talk to my wireless network; I entered my SpeedTouch 570 router’s SSID, I carefully added the WEP key, I used ipconfig /all at the Windows command line to get the MAC address of each wireless card so I could add them to the router’s permitted list of MAC addresses. Nothing. Each time the only way I could get the Windows XP machines to see my network was to disable WEP entirely - hence why I now see why many people might think ’soddit, I’ll turn the security measures off’.
In the meantime, I did discover that partially dropping security might help - by default my router only allows computers with the correct SSID to connect; turning off that basic security measure seems to have helped. But why should Windows XP force me to drop my security? Even a toy like a Nintendo DS can manage it.
With a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room - which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).
The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends - eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.
So, another little bit of innocence lost.
But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…
They’re stupidly named - nowt personal about a box that sits in the living room and which we fight over control of… but I finally gave in and bought a ‘Personal Video Recorder’.
Torn between the Topfield and the Humax, I plumped for the Humax - it was so much cheaper and I sense it’s easier to use - and as it’s less-hackable, less of a time-sink.
I think I made the right choice - on the downside, I can see why they it the ‘Hummy’ - it hums! I know two people who have them and I never noticed it before, but the fan is a bit louder than I’d hoped. On the plus side, it was a doddle to set up and use. Within no time I was watching back a programme that was still showing from the start, whilst recording another. And it felt good. I felt smug.
Of course, I couldn’t resist a fiddle. I’d heard Mac software for getting stuff off the Humax using its USB interface was about and this blog got me started. It seems to work - at least on a short clip - but it’s insanely slow, though - but that’s true of the Topfield as well. And even before I bought it, I’d decided that what gets recorded on the box, stays on the box…
Someone was chucking this out - a G4 PowerMac with OS 8.6, a 10GB hard drive and 64MB RAM.
I spent £30 on 256MB more RAM, and stuck in it the 20GB hard drive I used to have in my BondiBlue iMac. Luckily this hard drive already had OS X on it, as this G4 doesn’t have a DVD-ROM drive. Made this drive the master, added the computer’s own drive back in as a slave, and now I have a pretty servicable computer in the back room for the kids and family - all for £30. The flooping huge Apple Studio Display gives a damn good picture too!
Still a few things to do - this is one of the very first G4 PowerMacs I think, and it only has a miserly 2 USB ports, so a USB hub is pretty essential. But it also has two Firewire ports and once I’ve flattened the 10GB drive I’m going to see if it’s up to some video editing. A DVD-ROM or CD-R drive would be cool too, if possible.
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