My dealer has been busted!

Ok, the Pismo hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m a bit stuck [for testing your DVD drive before dispatching it].
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that all 4 drives I have are faulty.

I’ve finally succumbed to Apple’ iTunes Music Store. My purchases were:

• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Radio K.A.O.S.
• Amused to death

My dealer has problems:

I think my reference machine has become flaky as it is erroring every CD and DVD drive I have.

I prefer to test every item before shipping but I’m unable to test the DVD drive.

I have another on the way in a couple of days and will look at repairing this one.

So I can either ship you all the parts with the DVD drive untested, or hold on for a few days until I can test it.

Sympathy for him.

Not too big a problem for since I’m away at a training course tomorrow and will probably be too knackered to do any surgery over the weekend. Perhaps I’ll learn patience!

I wish I had the time to read through all of this!

OK, while not making up article titles based on Pink Floyd material and drooling over my Pismo, I do other things:

1. work (I’m Production Manager at a Scottish educational publishing house)
2. maintain Digital Evidence, my online photo album
3. try to promote Fairtrade
4. and have just been elected Treasurer of the local Community Council.

I think that’s as near as I’m ever going to get to having a life!

We heard on Monday about a schools event in Glenrothes: Out of School Hours Learning and so commited 3 staff-days to it. Turns out it’s mostly aimed at primary and we have almost no primary school books. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching primary kids at the workshop in the hall where our stand is: it’s about capuira, a brazilian dance/martial art!

This is the only English-language link about it I can find. However, if you speak Indonesian…

My Buffalo 802·g wireless card arrived. (See Silicon Overdrive.)

The outer wrapping only mentioned various flavours of Windows, despite the ebay advert mentioning that the card worked with G3 and G4 powerbooks. A quick google told me that the card does indeed work with macs – but only under OSX. So do I

• give up on 802·g, sell this card and buy an Apple airport (802·b) card
• wait until the parts mentioned in Interstellar Overdrive part 1 arrive and are installed and then pollute my Pismo with OSX?

I’m actually a grudging convert to OSX: I can count the times I’ve crashed it on my thumbs, waiting on a recalcitrant web page to load doesn’t block the rest of the mac and Safari beats the pants off Internet Exploder. The downside is that OSX is slow on a G4/400 with 5400rpm disk. I think it will be even slower on a G3 with a slower hard disk.

The moral of this story is ‘always be bloody sure of what you’re buying on eBay!’

I have ordered

• 512GB of RAM (so I can keep the current 128MB and hence total 640MB)
• a second-hand 30GB hard disk (wish I could afford the 150GB 5400 rpm version)
• a replacement LuckyGoldstar DVD-ROM/CD drive. See Silicon Overdrive for why I need this replacement.

  (The better Matshita drives won’t fit behind the plastic bezel that covers the LG model. I’m sure a judicious bit of carving could sort this but eventually I’ll get a DVD-RW drive and that won’t properly fit behind either variety of bezel anyway.)

Time to break out The Piper At the Gates of Dawn and indulge myself.

… MsInvisFem for the new picture

OK, now I finally have the laptop of my dreams(1) and am sitting in bed irradiating my face, warming my groin and keying my verbal diarrhoea into LiveJournal. However, being an inveterate twitchy-fingered would-be geek who just can’t leave well enough alone, I can’t wait to upgrade, peripheralise and modify it.

Here’s the plan so far.

REPAIRS

• The power cable is very dodgy and needs replaced ASAP.
• The DVD-ROM drive was DOA. This may have something to do with the Pismo being shipped with a CD in the drive. However, I’ve also been told that Apple used LuckyGoldstar and Matshita drives. LG are allegedly extremely prone to sudden death. So just guess which brand my Pismo has.

You may want to know how I managed to install anything on the Pismo. Well, the vendor installed OS9.2 before shipping so I didn’t need to install an OS. I have a DVD-ROM/CD-ROM in an external USB2 enclosure. This is very flaky but stayed alive long enough for me to install a previously-bought Ratoc PC card which facilitates use of SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 peripherals. Then I installed all my OS9 junk via a Lacie SCSI-1 CD-RW drive. Currently there’s no way of installing OSX. Fortunately there’s currently no actual need for OSX! I do miss Safari and I can’t tell you how tedious not having iJournal is right now.

UPGRADES

• 128MB is OK for OS9 (but makes Photoshop a bit pedestrian) and is not enough for OSX. Eventually I’ll want to max out at 1GB.
• The stock 6GB HD is nowhere near enough for OSX or my modest iTunes collection. 150GB HDs are available but I’ll probably go for 20 to 40GB and some form of external storage/backup. A large NAS(2) device would be just spiffy for sharing files between the Pismo and my G4/400 desktop.(3) Failing this, I’ll just have to keep my Eudora folder on iDisk!(4)
• A DVD-RW drive.
• Wireless. A Buffalo 802.11g card is on the way. (Otherwise I’d be limited to classic Airport: 802.11b)

PERIPHERALS

• A decent set of headphones!
• I’ll possibly transfer my Wacom A6 graphics tablet to this machine and get something funkier for the G4. Not really a lot of point in this since my eventual aim is to upgrade this Pismo enough that I can retire the G4.
• A USB hub (Well how else do I attach my PDA, graphics tablet, external keyboard, printer, scanner, digital camera,….?)
• Since my aim is to have this machine eventually become my main machine, a 17-inch or bigger flatscreen monitor. I quite fancy Wacom’s graphics tablet -cum-21-inch monitor.
• Some form of docking station to avoid all the tedious unplugging business.
• A rest for angling the keyboard and blowing cool air onto the underside.

MODIFICATIONS
This where the Pismo (currently a 400MHz G3) will really leapfrog the G4 and become properly suitable for OSX.

• Apparently I can get a 1GHz G4 chip fitted in the Pismo. So either I’ll have a shit-hot laptop second only to a 17-inch Powerbook G4 or I’ll have the world’s most expensive toaster.
• Failing this, 500MHz G4offerings from DayStar, FastMac or PowerLogix will still blow the socks off the G4.
• The Pismo is sleek, black and curvaciously sexy. So please talk me out of colouring the shell dayglo Paisley pattern!

OK, time to post my ramblings and go to sleep , cudding my baby.

Notes

1. OK, the 500MHz model would have been nice but at under £200, even I can’t complain!
2. Network Attached Storage
3. I wonder if Firewire drives can be accessed simultanously by two macs?
4. Apple’s on-line file storage system. You too can rent some space on Steve Jobs’ servers!