eMac gripe.

I've been using my eMac as my media server-cum-iPod docking station for about a year and a half, and it serves its purpose just fine, but I do have one serious gripe: That keyboard blows goats.

Seriously, could it possibly have less tactile feedback? Perhaps if they used stale marshmallows under the keys instead of fresh ones...

The only reason I haven't replaced it with the old keyboard from the iMac is that it's footprint is so much smaller, which is an important consideration in a keyboard that gets used maybe once a week. That and it's... well, prettier and cooler-looking, and the white keyboard matches the eMac. How Mac-dorky is that?

One thing that I am impressed with, however, is how useful it still is for web surfing; for a six-year-old machine, it's still capable of most everything short of gaming or video-heavy applications.

Stymied.

The aforementioned Apple IIc has just sat forlornly in its case since it arrived on my doorstep. Last night it occurred to me that I hadn't inspected the flat, zippered compartment on the case's lid...

Hey! 5.25" floppies! With the names of what appear to be games on them!

Today I worked up my mojo to pull the little monitor up from the basement and set the machine up, only to find that I was short a video cable. Now, given who my roomie is, I know there have got to be a squillion cables lying about the house, but I'm going to have to wait 'til she gets home to find one.

Bummer.

Back on Mac.

Well, my old P4 tower puked its power supply last night, and that meant cranking up the eMac.

It's only a year younger than the wintel box, and it was a stripper when it was new, compared to the P4, whose video card alone cost nearly a quarter of the eMac's purchase price.

Still, I used the G4/500 "Sawtooth" tower for the better part of a year, and this thing is a ton better than it. We'll see how long it takes me to cry "uncle" and repair or replace the PC.

Mysteries of science.

Okay, so I'm ripping my CD collection to iTunes via my old iMac DV SE.

The target directory is on my external FireWire disc. On some CDs, things bog down to the point where I'm showing stuff being imported at "0.3x", and it will occasionally even choke completely.

What the heck is causing that?

Thanks to the magic of FireWire Target Disk Mode...

...I finally got OS 10.4 running on my G4 Sawtooth.

For those who are unfamiliar with Macs, Target Disk Mode (first in SCSI, later in FireWire) is a neat method that allows you to power up a Mac in such a way that you can use it as an external hard drive for another machine. Pretty handy.

In this case, I've had problems with the antediluvian 1X Matsushita DVD on the Sawtooth not being able to read modern DVDs. The situation was to boot the G4 into Target Disk Mode and hook it by FireWire cable to the iMac, which saw it as a local drive. Then I just ran the install for Tiger normally.

It's a beautiful day...

...and I need to write my LEM column.

Also, I need to play with old Macs to get my writing mojo going. I can't decide whether to continue tinkering with the 7100 or to drag down a few of the others I haven't yet booted up and see if they're working and what's on them. There's a Quadra 610 and a Centris 650 that haven't been booted yet; may as well do it while I have the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all down here ready and waiting.

Punked out.

So I unhooked the TAM from where it's been sitting in the corner of the dining room and parked it away. I schlepped a 14" Apple monitor, and an old keyboard and mouse down from the attic. I went back upstairs, dug out the massive Quadra 950, dragged it to the head of the stairs, and...

...punked out.

I realized that this beast didn't have a CD-ROM drive. I had never booted it up, and had no clue what OS was already on it. I have no OS floppies well, except for system 6.0.7 for my SE; fat lot of good that does me if something's pooched. There's a SCSI external CD burner around here someplace, but hey, look! A Power Macintosh 7100/66! It has a CD drive! And I've played with plenty of Power Macs lately. I'll just work up to tackling the '040 tower gradually by getting my feet wet with a much more familiar old Mac.

I turned the 7100 on for the first time and it chimed to life without a hiccup. It sported 40MB of RAM and (whoah!) a brace of 1.5GB hard drives. That's pretty sexy specs for 1994; I think at the time I was using a 486DX/66 with... 8? 16? MB of memory and a 250MB HDD and there wasn't a game it wouldn't run.

The 7100 was running OS 8.0; I immediately threw in my 8.6 upgrade CD, and while it was crunching away, I went to find my 9.1 CD.

Which was in my TAM. Which was all powered down. Thank $DEITY for paperclips...

Unfortunately, to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1, you have to boot from the CD, which this 7100 resolutely refuses to do, no matter how I prod it. More later...

Monday's child will boot up in a tower case...

Tomorrow's project: Boot up either the Quadra 900 or Quadra 950 tower, and see if I can get it running OS 8.

Lowered Expectations...

Once something becomes a "mature technology", you begin to take it for granted.

When silicon chips and LCD displays became cheap and common enough, there was no longer any really burning need to spend the money on a Seiko or Casio digital watch if all you needed to know was what time it was; the fifty cent watch from a gumball machine could do that.

Some technologies are more mature than others.

Repeat after me: I will not buy a cheap-ass "powered USB hub".

&^*$@%^&&**!!!!!

Drinking from the fire hose.

Moving up here, my CD collection filled two big cardboard boxes slightly larger than longneck beer cases.

The iMac has a 13GB internal hard drive.

To quote Roy Scheider: "You're gonna need a bigger disk."

State of the Experiment Address.

I'm typing this on my iBook, sitting on the front porch. For the last three weeks or so, I've been doing all my computing on Macs, none newer than eight years old. Not being much of a power gamer any more, this is all blogging, web surfing, writing, emailing, iPodding, and what-have-you. Here's how it's going:

The iBook, a G3/466 Firewire machine, was no great stretch. It's been my de facto portable all along. It's running the latest version of Panther, and has been for about a year. With my recent Firefox woes, I've started using Safari on it and will download Camino as soon as I get around to it. It connects to the network with its internal AirPort card.

My G3/250 WallStreet is in use as a "bridge" machine, running OS 9.2. It stays more-or-less permanently plugged-in in a corner of the living room with a Farallon WiFi PCMCIA card and an AppleTalk dongle hanging off it. Should I do some writing on one of my "lap savers", a 2400c or a Duo 280c, I'll AppleTalk the file to the WallStreet and email it to myself.

A G4/500 Sawtooth tower is my main machine. Browsing the web with Camino, it's also using Panther because the old Matshita LP-2 DVD drive won't read my Tiger install. Because it's still on Panther, and with its two USB ports clogged by the Logitech mouse and keyboard, it provides a job for the last computer.

Sitting next to the Sawtooth on the desk is a slot-loading G3/400 iMac DV SE. I have Tiger up and running on it. Thanks to the magic of a powered USB hub, it has a Hawking USB WiFi connection, as well as serving as the dock for my iPod Nano and my card reader for the Compact Flash cards from my Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Using the iMac as basically a media server lets me rip CDs or download Firefly episodes without tying up the Sawtooth. As the internal drive fills up, I'll just go ahead and get an external FireWire drive for all the media crap. Since both the iBook and the G4 tower are (barely) just new enough to have FireWire ports, this will pay bonus dividends down the road.

Am I missing my trusty P4/2.4 yet? Nope. Not really. So far, these old machines are doing everything I need them to do. What I can't get over is the fact that I have a very capable, complet, four-computer wireless network, with two laptops and two desktops that could be had off eBay for much less than $1,000. Neat! :)

See, this is how it's supposed to work.

I'd been running OS 10.2.8 on the G4 tower.

Now, I like the idea behind OS X, don't get me wrong, but the early implementations left something to be desired. All the swoopy graphics touches that make the interface "pretty" are worthless if they make the machine limp along like an arthritic slug. I had hope, however.

As long as Jaguar was the only game in town, I kept my iBook (a G3/466 with 192 megs of RAM) running OS 9. It just wasn't worth staring at the spinning beachball of frustration every time I tried to do something. When the chance came to upgrade the clamshell to Panther, I jumped at it, and it's been running 10.3.9 just fine since.

That's what gave me hope: I knew that there was no reason that a G3 iBook should be faster than a G4/500 tower with half a gig of RAM, save for the fact that Jaguar is one bog-slow OS. When the mailman came yesterday, he probably wondered why I almost knocked him over getting the padded envelope out of his hands. I had the first Panther install disk in the G4 almost before the front door slammed.

It's like a whole new machine.

If I had a time machine...

I was messing around trying to get the TAM to talk to the 2400c when it occurred to me that if I had that setup back in late '97, I would have been big pimpin': Apple's super-snob appeal desktop machine and the flavor-of-the-month subnotebook were both serious computing status symbols when they were new, and would have gone together like peaches and cream. Free-range peaches and organically grown cream, of course. From some pretentious yuppie grocery store with carpeted aisles.

This has given me an idea for a post, or a column, or something...

UPDATE: Looking at this more closely, the Macs I'm using during my experiment (a G4 "Sawtooth", a graphite iMac DV SE, and a key lime iBook SE) would have been a pretty swoopy computing suite, circa late 2000. It might be neat to do a series of experiments; go "back in time" and try using a comparable suite from 1992 (Quadra 950/LCII/Duo 270c) or 1994 (Power Mac 7100/Performa 636CD/PowerBook 540c), and see how it feels.

This is me, tearing my hair out...

Remember the other day, when I was going on and on about how easy my little AppleTalk experiment was? Yeah, well, that was then, and this is now.

How come an ancient Color Classic, circa 1993 and running an OS that generated its zeros and ones by banging small rocks together, fired up and chattered back and forth with my much more recent PowerBook 2400 without a hitch, but when my Twentieth Anniversary Mac, a nearly contemporaneous machine, was asked to do likewise I got bupkis? I've tried both the 2400 and the G3 WallStreet and the TAM refuses to divulge its existence to the network through either the modem or printer ports.

Work proceeds apace on figuring out just exactly why. I'm all ears if anyone has any ideas on where to look.

...and a fossil comes to life.

I'm typing this paragraph in MS Word 5.1 on a Mac Color Classic as part of an experiment. If all goes well, this fairly unskilled Mac user is going to use her opposable thumbs, her wits, and a set of AppleTalk dongles to transfer the file to a PowerBook 2400c. Wish me luck...

And now we’re on a PowerBook 2400c running System 8.6, typing in Word:2001. I simply hooked the dongles to the respective machines, powered up the ancient ‘030 Color Classic running System 7.5.3, opened Chooser on the PowerPC 2400, turned on AppleTalk, and BAM! There was the Color Classic’s hard disk, all ready to be browsed. Now to re-save it with new edits as a .rtf file, open Internet Explorer, and use gmail to mail it to myself as an extension via the PowerBook’s Farallon WiFi card…

Abracadabra! Now we're on the desktop of a G4 Sawtooth running OS 10.2.8, using TextEdit to view the .rtf file that was begun on a fifteen year old Color Classic that doesn't even have enough hard disk space to install the operating system that is currently being used to manipulate the file. Even better, the whole process of transferring the file was done by a user who had never used AppleTalk until... oh... thirty minutes ago or so, and who had time to eat dinner during the whole process (A nice tossed salad with a delicious Wasabi Dijon dressing) and even clean up the dinner dishes.

No muss. No fuss. A file handed across three machines with completely different generations of operating systems and CPUs, with less drama than it takes to dub a DVD. Now to cut and paste into Blogger's edit window...

Digging in the fossil beds...

A care package from New Hampshire arrived the other day. Among other goodies, it contained a couple of AppleTalk dongles.

I'm thinking about dredging up one of my older all-in-one Macs, perhaps the Color Classic or the 20th Anniversary, and seeing how difficult it is to move a file between one of them and a newer machine without cheating and using my SCSI CD burner...

Mac 4 cheap.

Reader Casey writes

Hey Tam,

I read your other blogs, and just saw this one. How easy(and cheap) is it to convert from Win to Mac? I currently use XP on a box cobbled together from hand me down parts from friends who have money for "upgrades" .

I've been thinking about experimenting with Macs, something portable/laptopish, but don't want to invest a lot of money for something I may not go any further with.

Any recommendations(and expected prices) for something that would help give me a feel for Macs without breaking the bank? I have no problem with used or refurbished equipment.

...and I thought it rated a post of its own in response. I know he asked specifically about portables, but I'll touch on desktops, too, as we're in a fairly propitious time for scoring good deals on those.

For both desktops and laptops, Macs newest OS release ("Leopard", or 10.5) has effectively orphaned a slew of machines that have been in use for years. Although individual Mac fans will perform heroic work-arounds and hacks to let them install Leopard on systems on which it was never intended to run, the used market is currently seeing a slew of late G3 and early G4 machines being dumped for a song. I have seen older iMacs sold by the flat (six or seven computers) on eBay for less than you would pay for even a minimal new computer.

As far as notebooks go, the clamshell (or "toilet seat") iBooks are bottoming out in the depreciation curve. Even late models are bringing less than $200 for the most part. Some of these later iBooks have DVD players and FireWire ports. I still use one as my main notebook; it has built-in WiFi and makes a great traveling computer.

For all-in-one desktops, iMacs are getting stupid cheap. As the last schools using them are forced to upgrade, they can be snagged for next to nothing from resellers. Mine is an early slot-loading model with DVD and a 400MHz G3 and came with a (mismatched) keyboard and mouse for a bit under $100.

The biggest effect lately has been that all the early Power Mac G4 towers that have been used as servers and production machines lo these many years are having their hard drive pulled or wiped and being shipped off to resellers. I've got a G4/500 tower here with half a gig of RAM and DVD drive and a Zip drive and the works; I won it for seventy-four dollars and some-odd cents, shipping included. It had a wiped 27GB hard disk and came with nothing but a power cord. That's okay, though, because it hooked right up to my existing monitor and USB keyboard and mouse. All I had to do was disconnect my Pentium 4 box and plug the Mac right into the exact same cables. It didn't even need a driver installed to make use of the eleventy-jillion key Logitech keyboard.

So, yes, if you want to get into just playing around with Macs to see if you like them, now's a good time to score an old one cheap. Just don't plan on doing a lot of gaming with it, unless you like older games.

The experiment has started...

Maybe it marks me as getting old, but it feels really weird to call a G4 tower a "fossil". I'm just sayin'.

And as far as "computing on the cheap" goes, I'm pretty happy with picking up a G4/500 with half a gig of RAM, a Combo Drive, and a Zip drive for just under $75, shipping included...

Neat-o.

I don't often wax fangirl-ish about computer hardware...

All my PC's, from that first XT to the newest P4, have borne the mark of the inveterate tinkerer: The cases were held shut not with the factory Phillips head screws, but rather with large knurled aluminum or plastic thumbscrews. I've swapped out or installed enough expansion cards to consider myself a fairly dab hand at the process.

I just installed an AirPort card in my G4 "Sawtooth". Wow! Lift one latch and the whole side of the case, motherboard and all, swings down and displays the machine's guts. In pops the card, raise the side and latch it again and hey, presto! All done. This thing is just all ate up with clever industrial design touches, from the one-latch case opening to the built-in carry handles. I'm liking this a lot.

Stepping off the technology train.

My first real PC was an XT I bought back in 1990. I was able to use my beau's 386DX for a bit, and so I didn't buy my next one until 1994, a 486DX/66. It was followed by a Pentium 133 in '96, a PII 233 in '98, and an 800MHz Celeron in 2000. In early 2003, I walked into a retailer and bought the baddest machine they had in stock, a 2.4GHz P4, and the best sound and video cards I could get.

Five years later, with the machine running pretty much the whole time except for the occasional reboot, that machine is still in use as my primary computer. I also still have that Celeron box, although it may be time for a new power supply, as the fan on that one is starting to sound like a mating cow.

I don't game like I used to. There's not many games out there that have just compelled me to run out and buy them, and even if I did decide to play computer games again, I have two long-neck beer cases crammed full of jewel cases for games I already know I like. That's probably sixty to eighty pounds of CD's.

I'll probably bump the RAM on this machine up to a full gig from its current 512Mb, and maybe toss in another hard drive at some point, but I suspect that until there's a quantum leap out there that just forces me to upgrade, I'll be running this XP box for years to come. After all, that Celeron is still running 98SE, and I never get the burning urge to upgrade it when I turn it on...