I spent almost the entire weekend nose-deep in various laptops, attempting to get one or all of them to wake up and tango again. My first patient was a client’s 700mhz iBook, which had stopped booting up after sleeping down its battery to empty. After spending an hour attempting the various revivification techniques, I called it dead and got the OK to pull the hard drive. Apparently this was the most complicated, difficult model Apple ever designed, because it took two hours, three different websites, a package of bamboo shish kebab sticks, and a lot of patience to crack the case. Once I’d gotten it out, it was a no-brainer to slap in an external drive, and the files appeared normally.
The second patient was a $40 Powerbook 1400 I got off Craigslist for reasons I still can’t explain entirely; it has something to do with having a working OS 9 machine that doesn’t take up half a desk’s worth of space. (I own a Powerbook 100, which is essentially a Mac Plus, for the same reason.) It came with an ethernet PCMCIA card, and I’ve got a compatible wireless card scavenged from a dead AirPort Base Station, but the complicating factor is that this unit came with a floppy drive and no built-in Ethernet. The version of OS 9 on the disk is faulty and it won’t load the PC card drivers to activate ethernet or wireless. I don’t have a SCSI CD drive anymore (my No More Beige rule is skirted by the fact that these laptops are all Powerbook Black) and Apple stopped shipping OS installs on floppies back in the OS 8 days. So I pulled the hard drive and spent hours attempting to install a fresh copy of OS 9.1 on it via a FireWire enclosure, but the 9.1 update kept hanging, resulting in an incomplete System Folder and a flashing disk icon at boot.
I hate it when I can’t solve a problem on my own.
So I’m going to borrow a SCSI CD drive from a client down the street and see if I can get this @$*!&! thing to install. Then, providing it works, I’m going to get the wireless working and set it up as a support machine to run all the OS 9 apps I still use (PhotoVista being the latest in a long line.)
Finally, I set up Jen’s father’s new laptop to work with his wireless network, installed Office, and made sure his email was set up correctly. Vista seems nice, but at first blush, there are a lot of useless bells and whistles that get in the way of what I want to do. I’m happy I’m still running XP here.
For now, I have a small mountain of obsolete Apple iron beside my desk, waiting for some non-billable time I can waste making old things useful again.
Update: No luck. DRAT!
Update Update:This link doesn’t really help much (I want OS 9, not OS 7) but I’m wondering if I can connect it via SCSI disk mode and install from another Mac (My B/W G3 here has Ultra-Wide SCSI, which means I’d need to score a MiniD68 to DB25 cable somewhere—an expensive proposition, most likely) but it’s hard finding any documentation on this. Also, it looks like drives above 4GB aren’t supported on the 1400, which dorks that avenue. So I’m back to an internal CD drive on eBay.
After rising at the ass-crack of dawn, we drove to the City of Brotherly Freezing Love to attend an Adobe seminar on the CS 2-3 suite. We’re still working in earlier versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (after having been burned by Illustrator CS) and now that we’re both on Intel Macs, we decided it’s time to upgrade.
It is with a heavy heart that I bid my trusty iBook adieu; after about 50 emails from various flakes, kooks, scammers, hosers, hustlers, dorks, cheapskates and losers over the course of a month, I had one very nice gentleman email me this afternoon, make an appointment, keep it, pay me cash money, and leave with the merchandise this evening. Which means this MacBook Pro is almost 1/2 paid off.
(The previous guy that emailed asked me all kinds of questions about the input jacks that he obviously knew the answers to, mentioned GarageBand, and tried to get me to come down on the price because there’s no audio input on that model. Sorry, dude.)
So, sayonara, little guy; thanks for the memories. I’ll miss your portability but not your little screen. I’m certainly not missing your keyboard, although it’s taken me a full month to get used to this new one.
Oh, thank GOD we stuck with Cingular Wireless. I am going to buy myself an iPhone as soon as I can afford one and ditch my thankless Motorola 551, and it will be a Good Day. OSX (Safari on a phone!) Touchscreen dialing, bluetooth, improved contacts, syncing with my Mac and more. I only hope the reception is better than a RAZR. This sounds too good to be true, honestly.
Here’s a handy way to check your internet connection speed. You’l need Flash to do so.
Everything with the new MacBook Pro has been going swimmingly, up until this afternoon when I ran headlong into a brick wall. You see, I’ve got this one little utility which was written in 1991 or so which takes Mac fonts and converts them into PC versions so that I can transfer files back and forth, enabling my PC programs to edit Mac-authored files, and vice versa. Now that I’m on the Intel Mac, I can’t run OS 9 in the background under emulation like I used to on my iBook. So, I booted up the trusty old G3 tower under my desk to use the application there. Because I’ve hooked my second monitor to the MacBook, I don’t have a monitor on the G3—no problem, I’ll just use Remote Desktop, right? Wrong. Remote Desktop 2.X is incompatible with Intel Macs, so I have to upgrade to 3.0, which costs $300. Argh! Now my iTunes server, downstairs on the porch, is cut off from remote administration. Double Argh!
I found a website which points to a little application called SheepShaver, which purports to run OS 9 on Intel hardware, but apparently one must have the boot ROMs handy to be able to get the thing hooked up—something I don’t have time to fool with right now. When I get a moment to get it sorted out, I’ll write about it here. But for now, I have to dive under the desk to swap the monitor cables. Again.
Update: After a bunch of false starts and failed attempts, I found this article, which is a lot more detailed than the first. Knowing which ROM to use, which install CD to use, and the correct keyboard file helps out a lot. Still no success, though.
Update 12.27: I got Basilisk working with a copy of a Quadra 650 ROM linked from the second article above. SheepShaver just didn’t seem to like the ROM I pulled from the OS9 disk; whatever. Basilisk is running OS8 with no problems, and that’s all I need.
Update 1.1: I’m going to run through this so that folks can benefit from my experience:
Download Basilisk. Uncompress the Basilisk file.
Download the Quadra 650 ROM found here (and good luck if it’s not still available.) Drop it in the Basilisk folder.
Open Disk Utility (found in Applications->Utilities.) Click on New Image, and make a disk image at the size you’d like (my image was 500MB, and after installing OS8, I had 350MB of free space left.) name it what you like-I called mine “OS 8 Disk”. Drop that in the Basilisk folder as well.
Start up the “BasiliskGUI” application. Cringe at the UNIX-tastic UI goodness!
Under the “Volumes” tab, click Add and browse to the image you just created (in my case, the “OS 8 Disk” volume.) Inside this volume, you’ll install the operating system.
Under the “Keyboard” tab, click browse and navigate to the BasiliskII_keycodes file in the Basilisk folder. This way you’ll be able to use the keyboard under emulation.
Under the “Serial/Network” tab, select slirp in the Ethernet Interface pulldown. This allows the OS 8 emulator to use the ethernet interface.
Under the “Memory/Misc” tab, bump the RAM size up to 128MB or so. I have the Mac Model ID set to Quadra 900 and CPU Type set to 68040. For ROM File, click Browse and navigate to the quadra650.rom. This is how Basilisk gets to the point where installation can start.
Additionally, under “Graphics/Sound”, I changed the refresh to 15mhz and width/height to 800/600.
I used an OS 8 install disk for my installation. Put it in the machine and click the “Start” button. This should bring up a window with the happy mac and start booting off the install CD.
Install OS 8 with whatever options you like. Restart the emulation; it should bring up the installed OS. From here, you should be able to get online, bring up a web browser, and use OS 8.
If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be running OSX, Windows XP and OS8 on the same machine concurrently, I would have laughed at you.
Update 3.19.07: I was able to get the shared folder working with Basilisk, finally, and it’s much easier to use than mounting and unmounting the disk image.
This is so strange, and very hard to get used to, but… I have two monitors on my MacBook, the laptop screen and an external monitor. The native display runs all my Mac stuff, and the external monitor is handling Windows apps, so I’ve got HomeSite runing in fullscreen on my left side, where a blocky ThinkPad used to live, but there’s only one laptp on my desk. Mousing between the two environments is seamless and easy. About the only thing that I had to alter was disabling my Mac’s default F12 quickkey (which toggles the Dashboard, something I find worthless) so that I could see quick previews in HomeSite. Oh, and remembering Command+( ) combination vs. Ctrl+( ) for basic modifiers like Cut and Paste wil take time, but that’s minor.
Shiny new Macbook Pro!
Next I’ve got to change my workflow around completely so that all my working files are in the same place (I had working files on both my PC and on my Mac, and some of them didn’t ever get synced up, a situation that I’ve had no luck fixing over the last ten years, and something that has caused major heartburn.)
I’ve noticed the MacBook runs pretty hot (the strip directly above the keyboard is very, very hot) so I’ll have to keep an eye on temps and the battery.
This is, without a doubt, a jump far into the future. How did I get by without it for so long?
I just got a delivery from FedEx with a new toy inside. It’s a shiny 17″ MacBook Pro, bought refurbished from the Apple Store (saving me $700). On first blush, this thing is beautiful. The keyboard is so much better than my iBook. And the screen? Well, let’s just say I have more than twice the room I had before. Moving all my data over via the Migration Assistant took about an hour, and when it came up on the new computer, everything was smushed over in the upper left corner of the screen. I don’t know how I put up with that tiny thing for so long.
I have another stick of memory to drop in it and then I’m going to install Parallels and a fresh copy of Windows XP, and try to get a decent development environment organized. This is very, VERY nice.
Update: Things are humming smoothly along; I’ve found that my external monitor only does 1280×1024, so I can’t make things any bigger than that, which is a slight bummer. I also just realized (slaps forehead with hand) that I can’t run OS9 on this machine, which means that a little legacy piece of software I’ve got called FontMonger is an orphan. I’m going to have to keep an OS9 machine around here just to convert fonts, I guess. The keyboard is sexy and feels great, but it’s taking me some time to get used to the tactile feel, and the backlighting feature is the bomb. Props to Other World Computing for their clear, easy to follow RAM installation guides. If you are buying gear for a Mac, I strongly recommend this company.
I’m also officially in love with the Apple Remote; I don’t know how I survived without one for so long. For those with more than one Apple Remote in the room, this little Technical Article will come in handy: pairing your remote with your particular computer.
Well, things are definitely moving along here at Idiot Central. Today is voting day, which means there’s been a steady stream of people walking down the street in front of the house to and from the elementary school. We’re going after lunch to stand in line and (hopefully) make our voices heard; I’ll be happy when I’ve ceased getting calls from Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton exhorting me to vote one way or the other, and the piles of direct mail switch back over to Christmas catalogs.
I’m looking at email a little differently this morning, as well. I got my hosting switched over to a new service, one which lacks in helpful configuration what it makes up for in sheer number of services at a rock-bottom price. I’m not going to recommend it just yet (although it would be in my financial best interest to do so) until I’ve wrung it out somewhat, but all looks to be working correctly so far. Now, I have to read up on migrating two years of Eudora archives over to Mail.app. You’ll also notice that some of my portfolio site is down—I have yet to upload the rest of my files.
Thirdly, I made a purchase yesterday that may put off the new laptop for a little while. More on that later…
I just got an unexpected freelance check this afternoon, one I knew was coming but wasn’t banking on until sometime mid-December. It’s deposited in my bank account this afternoon, which means I might just pull the trigger and get the new toy I’ve been dreaming of since the beginning of the year.