life’s a beach and then you die
Memo to self, type post - please ignore if you don’t have a Mac and a Nintendo DS…
You will need:
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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