In May this year my trusty PowerMac 5500/275’s power supply died. At £115 for a replacement, it didn’t make sense to spend that much money to repair a machine that’s only worth £250–300 overall.
Friends have helped me out—manDA has lent me her [second gen] iBook and Claire her Titanium G4 at various times. Love and thanks to you both.
But the fact remains that the most powerful computer in the house is now my daughter’s PM 7600/132. Now this is a great machine [as was the 5500], but there’s no way to run Mac OS X on it. Having a G4 Dual 1.25GHz at work now I’m very spoilt and a lot of the things I now do are based on the unix underpinnings of OS X.
So I need another machine. I whip out my no limit platinum credit card… Meanwhile back in the real world: I can’t afford a new Mac, no way no how. Second-hand Macs hold their price very well, so they are really out of my price range—I can’t come up with £400–500 straight off.
In an email conversation with aland he mentioned how little money was spent on building some very servicable BITPart machines for Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival.
So I’m thinking I’m going to build a Linux machine for home for as little money as possible. The task: an up and running Mandrake Linux 9.1 box by 01 September 2003 for less than £100. I’m looking for bits people!
I’ll let you know how it goes.
First of all I came across this item—Self-modifying hardware via distributed genetic algorithms—on the intermittently marvellous Boing Boing.
It interested me enough to look at original website—Distributed Hardware Evolution Project.
Now I’m a fan of distributed computing projects. I’ve been running SETI@home for over four years—here’s my SETI@home stats.
I’m also looking to expand my unix/linux knowledge as I’ve recently got a G4 Dual 1.25GHz as my main machine at work. So in conjunction with the excellent Mac OS X in a Nutshell, I’m taking on little Terminal projects.
I therefore installed the client for this project. Want proof? Look at the stats page.
I’m proud of myself. Having now successfully installed Movable Type and now this, I’m feeling a little more confident in the Terminal.
Inspired by my Drupal experiences and also by my recent playing around with rss/xml feeds I’ve decided to have a go at converting my existing rising7 website into a combination of static and weblog pages.
My motivations are multiple:
We’ve talked about expanding what burngreave.net can do and here’s another option for potential users to utilize.
I want to expand my own knowledge in this area, as I’m very excited by it.
I’m feeling inspired to be creative at the moment. I’m in the fortunate position of being involved in some great stuff and would like to record it.
Please feel free to comment either here or there.
I apologise in advance for the initial high percentage of test and rubbish postings, but these will be weeded out eventually.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
My thoughts so far on the various bits of software I’ve been playing with while experimenting with rss feeds. When I’ve got it all together, I plan to add this as a new section of the Mac notes page.
Mac OS 9
Amphetadesk
Free. Separate app which feeds to your web browser of choice. Worked OK under OS 9.2.2, but a bit buggy [especially when trying to quit].
bottomFeeder
Free. Applet for Visual Virtual Machine [a bit like Java]. Had quite a discussion with the developer who wasn’t at all Mac savvy. Worked OK some of the time and then would inexplicable stop, very basic, very slow.
Mac OS X
Amphetadesk
Free. See comments above. Seems much more stable under Mac OS X.
bottomFeeder
Free. See comments above. Haven’t tried it under OS X.
NetNewsWire
NNW Lite 1.0.3
free
min: Mac OS X 10.1.x
Used quite heavily. Very nice, but a few of its shortcomings did get quite irritating. I missed time and date info for incoming headlines. The checking options also seemed quite limited to me. Did the job and in my opinion the best of the free options.
NNW 1.0.2
$19.95, 30 day demo
min: Mac OS X 10.2
Same as NNW Lite plus date and author info, weblog editor, outliner.
Haven’t used this but the date and author info were something I wanted. I think if I were to get seriously into blogging, I’d be using Nisus Writer for writing, just I use it for everything else. Not worth the extra money.
Shrook 1.0.2
$19.95 [shareware I think]. The software doesn’t seem to be crippled in anyway, so it might be a time expiry deal. I’ll update if I found out.
min: Mac OS X 10.2
I really like this piece of software. It does everything NNW Lite does, plus provides date and author info, has more flexible scheduling options, and has a cool drawer visual widget that shows the rss feeds in reverse chronological order. This is really useful [and fits in with the way I read email for example]. Also imports NNW lists, which was very useful when I running both at the same time to compare.
If I had some money I’d buy it!
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
We run a 3 Mac network at home sharing our broadband connection (though I do have a line of site to Abbeyfield Park House…)
As our finances have meant our newest Mac is now nearing its 5th birthday (and unless an as yet undiscovered rich relative leaves me some money, this will remain the situation for some time), I’ve made it a project to keep our three Macs as up-to-date as possible.
The three are: PowerMac 5500/275, 7600/132 and 8200/100. They have all been running OS9.1 successfully (and in a very stable way). According to Apple this is the maximum OS that can be run on these machines.
If your machine can run OS X you can stop reading here as the following doesn’t apply to you.
OS 9.2.2 is the most up-to-date version of the “Classic” OS. It offers real upgrades in speed (20-30% quicker for file copying for example) and stability (especially in networking and internet situations). There also a few pieces of software (eg FinalCut Pro) that will only run on 9.2.x, and if you’re flash (and loaded) you can connect to an iPod.
I came across a fantastic piece of software called OS9 Helper which allows you to install these OS upgrades on machines where it shouldn’t really be feasible. The guy who wrote the software gives timely advice and was really helpful about my questions.
The installation process worked flawlessly (and as stated in the Read Me file) and took about 45 minutes per machine. Another insanely great piece of software (and only $10 shareware).
If you run virtually any PowerMac or PowerBook and are running anything other than 9.2.2 (especially if you’re running 9.0.x or 9.1), I’d strongly recommend you look at this utility.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Just for the sake of completeness I ought to add that there’s a page for actual [and potential] Mac users of burngreave.net. It’s at Mac notes, this page also forms part of the burngreave.net faq.
—
commented by me
20:00 25 June 2003
This page has been updated. The webspace section has been updated.
The rss feed section is completely new.
Originally posted to burngreave.net.