Blog entries from February, 2005

For Christmas my sister gave me a voucher for lessons at a nearby golf course. This is relevant now as I had my first of five half hour lessons this morning. We shall see how it goes…

I just thought that I should say that I’m not going ahead with the iMac project that I was considering the other day. Largely because the logic board I was looking at ended up going for half of what a complete iMac can be obtained for. It just wasn’t worth it.

A long time ago, at least a year but probably some time after I came across The iMac Rack-Mount Project, I thought an affordable way of getting a suitably powerful mac to play around with would be to take the logic board and drives out of a CRT iMac with a broken screen. I never did anything about it and my precious is a much more powerful system than any CRT iMac could be.

However in my my regular perusal of the items available on eBay this afternoon I discovered one that had previously escaped notice: “IMAC” PARTS. This is the logic board and drives from an iMac that has a dead screen and its current price makes it a very tempting purchase. What makes it a viable purchase is that there are already a few projects that have done just what I plan so problems like a replacement power supply have already been solved.

This morning I got up at the disgustingly early hour of 6AM in order to drive in to Station Pier to watch the arrival of the QE2.

After taking a number of photos of the QE2 being turned around to dock against the west side of the pier there wasn’t much to see so we decided to take advantage of the time to have a look around Port Melbourne and Fishermens bend. This produced photos of the old Webb Dock rail line, the underside of the West Gate Bridge and even of a container ship heading out and a tug boat heading back up the Yarra River.

Since we still had plenty of time before either of us had to be back we went over to Spencer Street Station to have a look and unlike my previous visits to take photos we actually went through the V/Line section of the station to take photos.

Hopefully I can find some time to sort through and upload all of these photos by the end of the weekend…

On my way home from Melbourne Perl Mongers tonight I remembered too late that trains would not be running through the loop after 10PM due to the construction at Spencer Street Station. How late? It was after walking almost a kilometre from where we had dinner to the station at Melbourne Central. I then waited around fifteen minutes for the next tram to take me to Flinders Street where I then waited another thirty minutes for the correct train.

Luckily this is the only regular event each month that I use public transport to get home from the city. In fact it is pretty much the only time that I go into the city at all…

One other note is that the way in Alfie and I detoured via Station Pier to take a couple of photos of the Sapphire Princess.

Thanks to Magpie RSS I have been able to integrate del.icio.us directly into this site.

The first place was for the ‘Other resources’ section at the bottom of the pages for the items in my computer collection. Once I saw a parallel between the directory structure I use and possible tags it was a trivial matter to retrieve the corresponding links. So far I have only done a couple of pages, one of which being the PowerMac 9600, with very few links. The advantage of this will become much more evident as I continue sorting through my bookmarks and posting them to del.icio.us.

The second place was to replace my links section with the links for a selected number of tags.

Now I need to remember to add descriptions to links as I post them and also go back through the links I have already posted. Doing this will bring a higher level of content to my site. And since content is king it is unlikely to be negative…

The second Apple PowerCD that I have obtained via eBay in the last month arrived today. Apart from this unit having the video cable and not having a proper power supply there is one very important difference. It can actually read audio and data CD’s.

The first unit that I got appeared fine when plugged in but it just refused to spin up when the door was closed with a cd inserted. So I will shorty be posting it back for a refund…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been slowly sorting through my computers in an attempt to clear up some space.

Towards this goal this afternoon I listed my second SGI Indy on eBay. Hopefully I can get a better price than two systems that have been listed recently…

Last week, after getting only a single response from a person in Adelaide, I listed two 19″ monitors (DIGITAL and SUN branded Sony displays) on eBay for the sole purpose of addressing a wider audience.