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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.

Nightshift, Sunday night into Monday morning. I’m doing a late one, one I normally avoid at all costs. I have a long prep session, and it’s very quiet so I lie on the sofa in the studio and start reading the book Jon lent me. It’s good.

I’ve turned most of the lights off. I can hear the rush of the air con, a red light glows by the door into the studio next door, and I too could be on a plane, hurtling Lord knows where, trying to get some sleep. I never can sleep on planes.

I drift off. Thoughts hurtle skywards. I can see the office block across the car park, geometrically perfect, orange light spilling from the stairwells. It looks like a Chris Ware drawing.

The tannoy barks news of an incoming audio feed. For a moment I’m not sure where I am, wake or asleep, at work or at home. I go to our office and look at a flourescent light in a lab in the college across the road that’s been flashing madly for at least 24 hours now. It’s Monday morning but there is no-one anywhere.

I had a slightly weird experience the other evening, listening to Tom Robinson on BBC 6music. They were talking about how comedy and music (well, arty pop and rock music) don’t normally mix too well, and as part of their discussion they played ‘The Black Hit of Space’ by The Human League. I think they played it because they felt it was unintentionally hilarious.

It starts something like this:

Been out all night, I needed a bite
I thought I’d put a record on
I reached for the one with the ultra-modern label
And wondered where the light had gone
It had a futuristic cover
Lifted straight from Buck Rogers
The record was so black it had to be a con
The auto-changer switched as I filled my sandwich
And futuristic sounds warbled off and on

Regardless of the artistic merits of this song (or lack of them), I felt really queasy hearing them mocking a song I used to listen to rather a lot at the time (early 1980s). It was like hearing someone saying your ex-girlfriend was really ugly – okay, she may have turned out to have been an unfaithful, neurotic nightmare, but I did fancy her at the time, and you’re saying I have no taste… also this is early Human League we’re talking about here. Reproduction is still one of my Desert Island Albums.

Back to 6music. They were giving it a pasting in the chat-room as well, apparently, but I couldn’t bear to look. Someone wrote ‘please stop it now!’ so they faded it early. Which was a shame, because they stopped it just before this amazing pair of couplets:

The Black Hit Of Space
Get James Burke on the case
It’s the hit that’s never gone
Time stops when you put it…

You see, I think it was a joke. I’m not sure I thought that at the time, but that’s my defence now and I’m sticking to it. And if they wanted to take the piss out of a track that really does sound like a bad Human league parody, there’s one right there on the same album…

Having said the Mac Mini’s not for me, I’ve changed my mind. Even with a few extras like a DVD writer, WiFi and Bluetooth, I can still get a MacMini for half the cost of a G5 iMac, and if I throw in a 17 inch TFT monitor with DVI input from Dabs, I still have �300 left over.

However, some people are discussing making the Mac Mini into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) – well, it’s a nice idea, but hang on a minute – look at the cost! The cheapest Mac Mini is �339, you then need something like an Elgato Eye TV box – the digital terrestrial TV version is �199 at the UK Apple store. That’s �538, and you only have what’s left of a 40 GB hard drive after OS X, iLife etc has finished with it. You’ll also need some leads and adaptors to make get the video output to your TV.

From John Lewis you can get dedicated hard-disk based DTT PVRs for �179. Take your choice – a Digifusion with twin tuners and 40 GB disk, or a single tuner Humax with an 80 GB hard disk. Okay, you can’t burn DVDs or Video CDs on them, but they’re at least a THIRD of the price of a Mac Mini-based PVR. I haven’t even looked around for deals, but I’m sure you can get cheaper ones.

Anyway, either solution has got to be simpler than trying to get MythTV to work…

Back at the old grey school, we had for a short, weird while a rather colourful English teacher called Tim Mowl.

Totally unbidden, a memory popped into my head this afternoon of a short story he once read to us, called ‘The Mezzotint’. My memory might be playing tricks, but I seem to recall that on that particular afternoon we, me and my fellows of the Lower Remove 2, were having our English lesson in the Physics lab for some reason. ‘The Mezzotint’ is a ghost story, and having it read to us in the cavernous Victorian laboratory seemed most appropriate. Using that most fiendishly efficient internet search engine, I resolved to track the story down and read it again.

I was expecting to have to order the book from Amazon, but it turns out that it was written by M R James, and thanks to Mr Charles Tyson you can read the whole story for yourself on the web. You might also want to explore the rest of Mr Tyson’s web site – it’s not quite like any other, and I rather like the whole enterprise. Well, anyone who describes his own solitaire computer game as ‘incorrigibly free’ can’t be such a rum cove, can he?