2009-10-28 22:23:00
A bit over half a year after putting my Powermac G5 to bed I've actually gone and sold her. A new member at the MacFreak fora was interested in buying a cheap Mac to get his feet wet after living on Windows all his life. He'd tried Linux which wasn't "it" and now was curious about OS X. While the G5 is no powerhouse by today's standards it's still a very nice box for a beginner. G5 @1.6GHz with 1.5GB RAM and 200GB of hard drive space. I sold it for 220, which is a bit under the market price but it's definitely fair money for a six years old box.
Ah! I'll miss her a little bit. She was my very first Macintosh and she was definitely a woman after my tastes: reliable, gentle, nice to look at and built sturdily ^_^
kilala.nl tags: powermac, apple,
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2009-03-14 13:50:00
Today Marli's shiny, new Macbook arrive. It's an absolute beauty! The new anumilumlum housing feels very slick and the keyboard's just a touch heavier than the previous model. Very nice.
I had the laptop installed and set up with all of her data within an hour or two, so now she's happily surfing away on her lappy. It'll probably last her for four to five years, so that's good value for money.
Unfortunately I did my RSI no favours because after finishing her Macbook I went on to reinstall my own, white one. Unfortunately I made a wrong choice in file systems somewhere along the way which made it impossible to run File Vault. So basically I reinstalled twice and then I fiddled, I fiddled and I dabbled some more. Basically I spent yet another whole weekend behind the computer, which will probably come back to bite me in the ass.
On the up side of things we now both have wonderfully working laptops ^_^ I've also decommissioned the Powermac that I mentioned earlier. For now it'll just go into storage. Speaking of, would you believe that Marli herself actually suggested getting a Mini for file serving purposes? o_O
kilala.nl tags: macbook, powermac, apple, health,
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2009-03-10 12:55:00
Seeing how we recently ordered Marli her new Macbook, I'll get full use of my own Macbook back RSN(tm). This has led me to debate whether I will finally put my Powermac G5 to sleep, or not.
I bought the G5 back in October of 2003 and it's served me well ever since. That's almost 5.5 years now! However, even the lowly Macbook runs circles around the Powermac when it comes to sheer processing power and frankly, these days the G5 is a bit noisy as well. Switching to the Macbook as my desk and couch machine will also save a bit on electricity since its consumption is much lower than the Powermac's.
So that leads me to wonder about the G5. I don't want to toss it, since it was my first Mac and it's still a beatiful machine. I don't want to sell it because we really wouldn't get much for it (probably around 350 euros). I don't want to run it as a file server, since it's too big and noisy.
So, what does that leave? I could keep it as a spare system in the case Macbook every craps out. That would actually make sense. I could also lend it to my sister who can always use a backup system, what with the laptop problems she's had in recent years. Menno doesn't have much use for it, since he plays a lot of sh'm'ups, so that's out the windows.
Anyone else have any interesting ideas?
kilala.nl tags: powermac,
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2008-01-14 08:52:00
Well, this is creeping me out... Kinda...
I have my Powermac booted in Firewire Target Disk Mode, meaning that it acts as if it were a dumb firewire disk. I've done this to copy over a few gigs of photos from my Macbook, since doing that over Wifi will take ages.
Well, the fans on my Powermac started out at a low hum, but over the course of two to three minutes their pace has been steadily rising. It's kind of creepy to hear their pitch go up for more than a minute. It makes me wonder how far they can go before breaking ^_^;
So now there's a -very- noisy hairdryer sitting beneath my desk, while I'm waiting for the copy to finish. I'm still waiting for a *SNAP!*, followed by an awful racket from one of the broken fans bouncing around the case. >_>
kilala.nl tags: apple, powermac, weird,
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2007-11-03 15:44:00
Last night I upgraded the first of our three Macintoshes to the new Mac OS X Leopard. I'd decided to start out with the Powermac, since that one's the least crucial of our Macs. Before upgrading her iBook, Marli wants to see the new OS work on my Powermac. And of course I'm saving the all-important work-Macbook for last.
The installation was -not- without problems. I'd forgotten that I'd installed APE (Application Enhancer), which royally screws up any new Leopard install. This isn't that farfetched, since it's a rather hackish piece of software.
After doing a completely fresh, reformatted, install I found another unpleasant surprise: the Migration Assistant software cannot import users whose homedirectory has been File Vaulted. Crap. This meant that I had to transfer all my files and preferences by hand.
So far I like the new OS well enough (haven't noticed much difference), though there's one thing that I already loathe: Spaces. I -love- having a virtual desktop manager built into OS X. Absolutely. I just hate two of the "features" of Spaces.
1. You cannot move windows from one desktop to another using a key combo.
2. Spaces automatically switches to the desktop containing the -main- window of the application you select.
Why is number 2 so bad? Well, let's say that I'm typing up a report on desktop 4. Now a friend pops up on MSN, through Adium. The new Adium window appears on my current desktop: 4. I switch to Adium, to type a reply, and "zing!" I'm moved to desktop 2 because that's where Adium's main window resides.
That fscking sucks!
More Leopard gripes later :)
kilala.nl tags: apple, powermac,
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2005-08-28 20:42:00
Sacrilege!
In order to play two of my favourite windows-only games from Yester-year, I've decided to run Windows on my beautiful, unsullied Powermac. Thankfully, I'm keeping the infection contained to a secluded space on my hard drive, thanks to the wonders of disk images and emulation software.
Earlier today I tried my hand at Bochs which was like the typical open source software: pretty good, but needlessly complicated in its setup. After fighting with that for a few hours I decided to give Qemu a try. I was pleasantly surprised! Not only is it very much faster than Bochs, but it was quite easy to get things up and running using the QemuX graphical interface. Within an hour and a half I was happily, yet slowly, running Windows 98.
The downside for me right now is that any CD-ROMs I wish to install need to be imaged to my hard drive and then loaded through Qemu. But it's workable and I will only use it to play "Settlers of Catan" and "Magic: the Gathering" anywho.
kilala.nl tags: windows, powermac, apple,
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2004-03-28 08:30:00
Well then! Lately I've been getting to know my new PowerMac more and more and I'm still very happy that I ever made the switch to Apple. The last couple of days I've been trying to get iBank to work for me so I can better manage our accounting. Unfortunately it still doesn't work fool proof for me, so I hope the people at their support forums can help me solve all of my problems.
It's also been a while since I put some work into it, but a month or two back I started on my first AMV (Anime Music Video). I'm still coming to grips with Final Cut Express and I can tell you that lip synching can be a real bitch, but hopefully I'll someday finish that little project. Unfortunately I've kind of lost my wind on this one for a while, so maybe I'll get back to it in a week or so. At least the video will _not_ be finished for the 1st of April deadline for the AMV competition at the A2k4 convention.
kilala.nl tags: powermac, apple, other tech,
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2004-03-28 08:12:00
Well, Apple has finally gotten rid of the overheating hard disk problems. Unfortunately the did not choose to relocate the thermo sensors for free, but they issued an update for Fan Control, which apparently is part of OS X. Jaguar users can download this pa tch seperately at Apple's Support pages, while Panther users get this update as a part of the 'jumbo patch' 10.3.3.
kilala.nl tags: powermac, apple,
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0000-00-00 00:00:00
For years now, Apple has been known to make stylish (or even sexy) hardware which has been designed with an eye for detail.
To me the G5 tower is no different. A sleek and simple exterior, with all of the required connectors neatly layed out. This time around the eye for detail's mostly apparent in the case locking mechanism (with it's fold-away lock loop) and the sliding Super Drive door. The cooling has also been perfectly executed and in such a way that the box almost seems to whisper (as opposed to my blow dryer Athlon system).
What else is there to say? I just _love_ the interior of the system! It's so neat and tidy!
The only bad side to this G5 is the fact that I had to take it back to the shop within two weeks for a replacement: the sound port at the back of the system wasn't properly sending out the right (as opposed to "left") sound channel. Basically I was listening to music on _one_ speaker :/
Coming back from our holiday I had about an hours worth of DV to edit in Final Cut Express. Since I knew my 256MB of RAM wouldn't cut it I went out and bought two additional sticks of 256MB, bringing me up to about 760MB. The installation was dead easy and now my G5's a bit more Snappy (tm). The second upgraded I performed was also a piece of cake, but afterwards I'm running into some nasty trouble. What did I do? I added a second hard drive...
Honestly... You'd think that just by addin a second drive you wouldn't be making any horrific changes to your system, right? Unfortunately you are! You see, for some stupid reason Apple decided to stick the thermal sensor which controls the hard disk enclosure fan up against the top of the systems case instead of right inbetween the disks. So right about now my second hard drive is running dangerously close to 60C or 70C whereas the sensor is happily reporting an enclosure temp of 30C. In other words: dangerous! Read more about these problems on this website where they've come up with their own sollution. I'd like to perform this mod myself as well, but I'll call Apple first to see if this breaks my guarantee.
So a few weeks after my initial problems with the hard drives over heating Apple issued a firmware fix for the G5 Powermac which solved the problem... Kinda: now the fans just spin a bit faster. So that's not a problem anymore.
So while Apple hardware is almost perfect they do sometimes make weird mistakes that make you go: "WTF?!". Just look at their video card selection these days. I'm just happy they've finally decided to up the default amount of RAM for most systems!
Grade (how happy am I?): B
kilala.nl tags: apple, powermac,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.