Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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On Tiny Computers

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

I saw a comment made by one of the phone company CEOs on a commercial implying that a smart phone is all you need. This seems stupid on the face of it. The screen is 3-4 inches big and the keyboard takes up the screen, uses a 12 key pad, or has a tiny flip out keyboard. Of course, the CPU horsepower is very limited due to the demands of battery life.

What if these things were fixed. Some can be fixed today. Imagine a device like an iPhone, which is a tiny computer running Mac OS X, that plugs into a dock like many mobile phones use for charging. The dock plugs into a keyboard/mouse and a monitor much like laptops dock.

The CPU is still very limited so only web browsing and basic office tasks are the fence. This is all most people need. Hit a price point of $600 for a phone computer with $200 for the dock/monitor and you can bring real value to the use. Tack on internet access through the cell phone side for $40-$60/mo.

This is an enticing device. It’s much easier to travel with, but can still expand to the full usability of a computer and you remove one standard gadget. Actually, two since the phones todya come with cameras. Workers who travel and use the computer for remote data entry might find this invaluable.

Posted in Computers, Ideas | No Comments »

Cube Upgrades Worth It

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

So, it’s been a few weeks since the Cube was upgraded; a replacement hard drive (quieter, newer), a new video card (way faster and 16 more memory), and a new CPU (3+ times faster). The Cube is still sitting dissembled on the desk, because the video card can get too hot. That turns it off at random times. And because I’m just lazy. It has been running almost the whole time.

The upgrades make the Cube useful in 10.4. It’s no speed demon, but is quite acceptable. I’ll list the problems below. Most are minor annoyances or observations. I like the Cube and it is my main machine right now. The case is attractive. The noise is hardly noticeable now that the hard drive isn’t emitting high pitched whines. This was a good experience.

I would like to get a game or two. SimCity 4 and something else that works on a G4 1GHz or something and try that out. The specs now exceed the original in all respects by 2-3 times.

You can’t multitask as much, because it starts slowing down as you add tabs to the browser and running apps. Coming awake from sleep mode has a ~30 pause, though the mouse and keyboard seem to work that’s an illusion.

Firefox sucks donkey balls on G4 computers. Camino and Safari work well. I like Camino a bit better and miss my FF AdBlock/FlashBlock plugins.

DosBox for Colonization can’t play in full screen. You have to drop the resolution to 800X600 and play in a window. This consumes on average 90% of the CPU. iTunes can play in the background with a rare stutter while you play.

You can’t tell what will make the video card overheat. High resolutions make it worse, but not always. Sometimes I think it would be fine sealed up and sometimes it would melt and take the whole board with it. I’m betting a fan before reassembling it completely.

The hard drive is very cool. The big CPU fins never seem hot. The L3 Panaflow fan in the kit is quiet nice.

The network is not as snappy as Intel Macs. Minor little delays when first connecting. BTW, Macs feel much snappier than Windows when working with the network. Win2K was coughing up something trying to transfer 8 gig. Mac started doing this a little, but fixed itself. Maybe an issue with NIC caching and default settings or traffic or OS caching of massive (in that day) files. Who knows.

iTunes is good. Don’t turn on Genius.

Not upgrading to 10.5. No Motorola disks and I don’t care.

On an aside; I’m loving the big G4 566 Digital Audio in the closet. It is very quiet and a great file server. Works well with the Cube.

Would love to stuff two caseless Mac Minis or a Mini and AppleTV in a Cube or Cube Clone case.

Posted in Computers, Mac, Rambling | No Comments »

Dual Core 2 Cube?

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

I have the Cube and Mac Mini laid bare and I think that I could fit two Mac Mini’s in an old Cube case. Two whole computers in a cute little package. This is just an idea. Spitballing.

Take the Mac Mini’s out of their case and they fit in a Cube pretty well. The Cube has lots of extra room in the DVD bay and the big heat dissipating fins in the core are not necessary. Dito for the full size 3.5″ hard drive and video card/logic board. Face one Mini in the DVD slot and the other where the logic board is. In between provide a 2 computer KVM. The bottom of the Cube has to be cut heavily to let all the ports out. The second Mac Mini does not need it’s DVD player, so that makes it even smaller. It would be great if there were a way for both Mini to share a single hard drive. This makes the second Mini unbelievably tiny.

Either the KVM or VNC could control the other Mini. Which leads into why. This seems to be to be a good background processing machine, like transcoding or running a game VM. The first Mini could be a media center or web machine, where the second one is a game machine. The biggest attraction is the attention it would get. I think a lot of people would like to see two tiny computers inside the case of the previous generation of tiny computers.

Cost is annoying and the biggest obstacle. Say, $200 for a Cube or replacement case then $400-$600 times 2 for the Mac Minis. So, $1400 without cutting and assembling. You can have a good MacBook for that cost. Much faster and better video than the Minis.

Posted in Computers, Ideas | No Comments »

Cube Upgrades

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Some Cube upgrades this week. I just go through completely dismantling the Cube and even now I’m typing this on the half assembled Cube.

The first upgrade was the hard drive. After some attention and consideration I realized the noisiness came from the hard drive and not the fan. A spare 160 gig drive was surrendered to a 128 gig fate and cloned from the existing one. Unfortunately, it seems that 9.2 won’t boot on it, but I don’t have any 9.2 applications. Small loss. The previous drive was date 120 gig Western Digital dated 2003. The replacement is a Western Digital dated 2007.

The next upgrade was huge. To replace the 500 MHz CPU with a 1800 MHz. This requires disassembling just about everything, pulling off the old CPU in the core, and putting it all back together. Lots of chances to break something, which I was able to succeed at. The base fan was plugged into the DC to DC board and I ripped out the plugin from the circuit board. Oops.

Which brings up the final upgrade. A Panaflo fan was already installed. The CPU upgrade came with another. I removed the old one, cut the connector off, stripped the wires, attached it to the DVD ROM power connector, and crossed my fingers.

Everything came back together and I have a much snappier and quieter Cube. First impressions are surprising. DOSBox works better. Firefox is oddly crapping out. It’s actually slower. PandoraJam just won’t run at all for some reason.

Update 10/27/2008:
The Cube has been running for days and in use almost the whole time.

Firefox is very annoying. It’s significantly slower compared to Safari. I’m also looking into other browsers. FireFox plus Flash just won’t run. So, no Pandora. Except it works fine in Safari, but I lose my AdBlocking.

DOSBox still consumes a lot of resources. This surprises me since the box is about 3 times faster. For Colonization I have to drop the resolution to 800 X 600 and run it windowed. Just too slow for full screen.

The video card runs hot and cool. You can’t always tell. Low resolutions are cooler, but low resolution with DOSBox is hot.

The CPU fins don’t seem hot. Neither does the hard drive.

The GeForce 6200 card needs a slow fan. Preferably, one that blows “backwards”. That would normally be into the computer. For a Cube that is blowing up and out. Any other direction only blows against a wall.

Posted in Computers, Mac | No Comments »

DOSBox

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

So, I was looking around for old games that would play well on the Mac Cube. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck and the Cube’s new 1.8 GHz (replacing .5 GHz) CPU is on the way. The Cube stands at a turning point in Apple history. It can play OS9 or Classic games and OS X games. It is 8 years old so anything that worked on it when new is long since abandoned now.

Some people still love the games for the Color Computer (1989), Tandy (early 1990’s), and DOS. Just look at the Atari game packs containing the greatest hits of the 1980’s. It’s funny how many more clock cycles our CPUs had compared to even 5 years ago. This computer has two complete CPU on the same space. With that much power you don’t need a Commodore 64 your can run it on any machine with an Emulator.

An Emulator is software that can make the code inside the Atari cartridge, floppy disk, or CD think it is running on the original, old system. This is horribly inefficient. There’s so much speed available you don’t even notice. In fact, most Emulators let you slow down, because the base computer is too faster and certain actions depended on the old timing.

In my quest for Mac games I discovered my old favorites. Games that ran in DOS the year I graduated high school and entered college. The Emulator to run them is DOSBox. It’s an open source project and it has the wonderful feature of running on Linux, Windows, and Mac. There is a text file that contains all the settings. It emulates a number of old Sound Blaster era sound cards and CGA and VGA era video cards. These devices were pretty low quality. The video especially is about what you would get from your standard TV.

Many games from this era have been abandoned or discontinued. If you are lucky you can find a download online. Some have been removed and others are available. Most of these games are 1-3 floppies or 1-6 meg. Most of us get more than that in email everyday.

My favorites are Colonization, the original, which has been remade very recently and is due out in a Mac version. And XCOM: UFO Defense. One more that I find tempting is Master of Magic and maybe Master of Orion. It’s hard to believe that these games are just as fun to play. The sound is marginally acceptable. The video is disastrously atrocious by today’s standards. The game play, the way the elements are balanced and the layout of the action screens, is much better the modern games.

Some other notables are Jagged Alliance and it’s sequel, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games. Jagged Alliance 2 and it’s variations are worth playing too.

So, if you’re interested in getting back an old game check out DOSBox for the DOS games and look up how to play the Win95 and Win98 games in Vista and XP. If all else fails you can download VMWare Player for free, track down an image of a Win98 install disk, and create a gaming VM. That’s what I did.

Posted in Computers, Rambling, Technology | No Comments »

Business Objects QaaS Utility Part 1

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Recently, I got the chance to break some new ground. Very exciting since I used to do this weekly and now it’s more like annually. Business Objects has the ability to provide web services to report data. With Xcelcius to create the pretty bar graphs and pie charts this results in simple dashboard like summary of data that just about anyone can understand. Data like what are the most likely body parts injured, how much do those injuries costs, and what are the most expensive claims on those injuries.

The design flaw in Business Objects toolset for making these web services is flexibility in copy a query from one database, called a Universe (someone’s got a big head), to another database. Each customer is in their own database. So, we want to copy a standard set of queries from the Demo database to the Client’s database. The Business Objects tool makes you rewrite the web service when you move it from between databases.

This can be a time consuming process. Let’s say you have a dozen queries for a client. It takes 5 minutes for each query. And you sign up 50 clients. 12 X 50 X 5 = 60 hours. This is Development’s time and excludes errors, which would take hours more. So, nice feature, but not production ready.

Let’s say you could copy a query from one database to another in 5 seconds and use a tool that anyone can manipulate. Now, it takes 60 minutes of a Business Admin’s, Project Management’s, Customer Service implementor’s,.. time.

That’s the tool. How to copy a Business Objects Web Service query from one Universe to another.

Posted in Computers, My Story, Programming | No Comments »

New Video Card in the Cube

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

The video card for the cube came in today and I just finished. It looks good. Somewhat faster. You can see that video tasks are off the CPU now. The 256 meg video memory is far more than any video card of it’s day. As a bonus it has an S-Video? jack for TV. It might be possible to use this computer as a second Mac Mini on the other TV.

Posted in Computers, Mac | No Comments »

New Macs

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

The last three days have been spent with my new Macs. One is a ~2000 G4 500 MHz Cube for a quiet personal machine. The other is a ~2001 Digital Audio Power Mac for a file server. I wanted to see if old Macs would suit my needs and see how cheaply I can get things done.

The Cube was slightly expensive $350 and the Power Mac was $180. More memory, 3 sticks of 512 meg @ $110, was ordered to help fill out and run OS X 10.4. Also, a replacement hard drive for the Power Mac to ensure reliability @ $45. And a USB 2 card for $30. Neither machine came with 10.4 and my install disks are for Intel machines. So, I got a copy of 10.3 with upgrade to 10.4 for $180. That was a little expensive.

So, the whole project adds up to $900 for two computers with about $320 in capital costs for all computers. No need to buy another copy of 10.3, the USB 2 card and memory can work in lots of computers.

Turns out that I have lots of PC100 and PC133 memory. Unfortunately, the last 256 meg stick went in to Adam’s computer and most of it is 64 and 128 meg sticks.

My first impressions were that both computers are impressive. The Power Mac is exceptionally quiet, which is something I couldn’t have predicted and is very much appreciated. The cube has a high pitched whine from a user installed fan or perhaps the hard drive. The speed is generally acceptable. The Power Mac feels a little faster and it should. The Front Side Bus is 33% faster and the CPU is slightly faster.

The Power Mac has been setup twice and is on it’s third right now. 10.4 causes problems on boot up. The symptoms might indicate a bad logic board or memory. Since, 10.3 will do everything I need and doesn’t make the system unstable I’m installing it. Hopefully, the never ending process of install and update will finish soon.

The Cube is a little more disappointing. The noise is very annoying and the silence was the reason buying the cube. The speed is a little low for Firefox. More than 3 tabs start to really slow it down. I’m a bit of a multitasking whore. This is going to drive me nuts. I ordered a Mac flashed GeForce 6200 256 meg video card and I’ll probably upgrade with the speed tripling 1.5 GHz processor. Hopefully, this will put me off of upgrading computers until the quad core MacBook Pros come out next year and the new MacBook Pro issues are worked through.

Both computers look good, are relatively quite, fairly responsive, and quite usable. Looking back at when I last used my PC133 memory; I must have chucked all those boxes at least 3 years ago and maybe 5. I’m pleased with them.

Posted in Computers, Mac | No Comments »

Audacity Interview on FLOSS

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

FLOSS Weekly 42: Roger Dannenberg of Audacity

Audacity is the free program that many people use for editing podcasts and other audio files. It works on most personal computers. Easy to use and free and works everywhere. That’s hard to beat.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity… Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Posted in Computers, Technology | No Comments »

Another Hard Drive Died

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Another hard drive died yesterday. The Mac Mini finally drove me to replace the 512 meg with 1 gig. In the process of taking it apart I shook it a little and that killed the laptop hard drive that it uses.

It’s so much better with 1 gig. Just booting up only leaves 300 meg free. So, the OS needs at least 700, before you open any programs. When I had 5 apps open it was hanging alot.

So, I left the Mini open and will find a replacement. One of the office stores carries 80 gig for $45. I just didn’t want to spend any money.

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Drive Indexing Programs for Mac

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

So, one way to store digital media is to turn hard drives into big 500 gig floppies. How do you know what’s on each drive?

CDFinder
CDFinder is the powerful disk cataloger and media asset manager software for the Mac.

DiskTracker
DiskTracker is the complete disk cataloging and labeling system for Mac OS X. It features an intuitive user interface and a bunch of useful features.

Posted in Computers, Links, Mac | No Comments »

Stack Overflow

Friday, September 19th, 2008

StackOverflow is a new Q & A programming site. Something to check out. I’ve been listening to the podcast about it.

Posted in Computers, Programming | No Comments »

New MacBook and MB Pro in October

Friday, September 19th, 2008

The rumors have it that new MacBook Pros appear in mid October. They should be more like the MacBook Airs. I can’t wait. Just 1 month. Maybe. Apple doesn’t let you know ahead of time. The stores think so too, since many Macs are on clearance.

Posted in Computers, Mac, Rambling | No Comments »

Lazarus the External Drive

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

So, the work drive I use for backups died last wk. That was quite a blow since my laptop drive had also died. Aren’t the odds of that supposed to be rare?

Last night, I ripped open the case to get to the meaty old PATA drive in side and plug it into a computer for a last ditch attempt to recover everything. Spinrite ran against it without a single problem. I was stunned. It made a light clicking sound earlier like it was dead. I plugged it into a USB interface and into the Mac and copied everything to Drobo before it could change it’s mind.

That drive got very hot. I guess the USB interface it came with burned out. It’s very good to have that 250 gig or so of data back.

Now, how do I use this for work without encountering the same risk of single device failure? Without spening $500 of my own money that is.

As a side issue, I noticed the number of drives I have left over and not doing anything. There must be 3-5 holding 1 TB easy. I ordered a second Drobo 1st gen to make use of them. The 2nd gens are $500, but the 1st gens are $325 while supplies last. That’s a very good price on a 4 drive RAID5 enclosure. Especially, one that does not need matching drives. It’s too bad Data Robotics doesn’t make a 6 or 8 drive unit.

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Using an Old Power Mac as a File Server

Monday, September 15th, 2008

8 year old G4s can run 10.4 or 10.5. A software RAID is easy and doable using PATA drives or SATA with a card. These are only USB 1.1 and not the 400mpbs USB 2.0. Again, a card is needed. Memory tops out at 1.5-2 Gig. Some have the 137 Gig hard drive limit issue. CPU upgrades are possible that add a second processor and more than triple the speed. These boxes are plentiful and cheap at $100+ depending on the model and features installed.

Links for how to use an Old Power Mac G4 class as a network file server.

This is a quick, terse walkthrough of screenshots taken under OS X 10.3.3 Panther and OS 9.2.2 to set them up for mutual file sharing using a crossover cable. (This procedure appears almost exactly the same for Jaguar(10.2) and Tiger(10.4) or OS 8.5 and OS 8.6 systems. The system preferences / control panels used are almost identical, and differences seem cosmetic.) If you prefer to see the screenshots for OS X 10.2 Jaguar instead, see this OS X 10.2 walkthru.
OS 9 / OS X.3 File Sharing

Using a PowerMac G4 as a server-ish machine?

Power Mac G4 as a Media/File/Print Server

Is PowerMac G4 suitable as a file server?

G4 NAS Drive

Posted in Computers, Mac | No Comments »

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