Everybody say Happy Birthday to my sister Renie today!
Jen and I have been doing some work with a friend of ours for the last year and a half, and we started on a new project with him a few months ago. I IM’ed him last night and he told us he’s sending us this cool phone for payment of services so far, which is very cool. This is no ordinary phone; it’s a VoIP (Voice Over IP) phone built by Cisco and made to plug into any broadband network around. You pick up the reciever, and as long as you have a fat pipe, you call out as you would normally, without paying exorbitant long distance fees. Thanks, John.
Proof positive that there are about seventy ways to skin the cat: Todd helped me figure out how to do the thing in 3DSmax that was beyond my ability yesterday. It took all of two minutes to show me, and now it looks great. I need to get past my dependency on looking at this application like I would Adobe Illustrator, and embrace the 3D. The trick is to not get as discouraged as I did yesterday, to the point where I just want to go home.
I’m looking for some kind of Neon how-to guide and source for parts out there; I picked up a trio of neon letters at State Salvage a few weeks back, and I’d love to hook them up to a transformer and get them working. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the electronics and it seems to be impossible to find a local supplier who carries parts. I’ll have to keep looking.
Meanwhile, the fans for the 3Com hub arrived today; besides a little tinkering with the clips inside the case, installation was a snap and this machine is currently networked through the hub with no problems. The fans are rated for 12 volts of power, but considering the originals were rated for 5.5, I think it should be just fine.
Macintouch has a good tip on reviving seemingly dead Powerbook batteries: boot up into Open Firmware (Command+Option+O+F) and type “reset-nvram” and “reset-all”. Then type “mac-boot” to boot normally. Theoretically, this should reset the Power manager and allow you access to the battery (if one day it shows up as dead to your machine.)