A Series of Tubes

I have many projects going at any given moment, but currently there are two that occupy most of my weekends. The first, and more important, I can’t say much about at this point, but there will be a lot of info about it when I finish in a few weeks.

The second project involves the iMac I recently acquired from my grandmother. It’s a Snow G3 600mhz slot-loading, with 256mb of ram. I have pretty much no use for it, since it’s running OS X 10.2 (10.3 is really the cut-off point for modern application compatibility), but rather than let the perfectly good 40gb hard drive go to waste, I’m looking for a way to use it for backups. I know I can use Intego Personal Backup X4 to periodically back up my stuff to it over my network, but I was also thinking about possibly attaching my external drive to it so I can access it from anywhere in the house. I haven’t decided on this yet though, I need to see if it suffers much of a speed hit first (or if it’s even possible). I’ve named the iMac Hestia, after the Greek Goddess of the hearth. It was the only name that really fit 🙂

Well, I’m happy to report that my computer’s surgical operation went through without a hitch. Well, there was a tiny little problem taking off one of the brackets from the disc drive, so one of the screws on it has been basically stripped of the teeth on its head, but it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I successfully extracted the foreign object from the disc drive:

A small, crumpled, ball of paper. It must have slipped in when the computer was in my bag. Well, what’s important is that it’s out now and Eve runs without any problems once again. Yay!

Somehow a small piece of paper has slipped inside my computer’s Superdrive (that’s what Apple calls their optical disk drives, no idea why), and it no longer accepts disks. When I put one in, it slides in like it should, then the drive hesitates and spits it back out. Luckily there’s no visible damage to the disk, but the drive is basically out of commission for the time being. I’m planning on dismantling the computer on saturday to retrieve the paper from the drive (I would use tweezers, but i can’t really fit them in there…Plus I want to open my computer :P). I would be doing the dismantling tonight, but apparently we don’t own a Torx screwdriver of the right size to open up a MacBook Pro, so it will have to wait. Oh well, I rarely use the optical drive anyway.

Apparently a protester crashed Bill Gates’ speech in China today, with a sign that said ‘Free Software, Open Source!’. This guy is awesome. He was ‘tackled by security’ and ‘taken away for questioning’. Oh well, he’ll probably never see the outside of a jail cell for a couple of years, but he’s still awesome.

Check it out on Engadget