Blog entries from June, 2005

Over twelve months ago when I got my 12″ PowerBook my plan was to run it through my four port KVM.

Six months ago I found a PS/2 to USB adapter that would work with my KVM and I failed to get lid closed mode working as per these instructions.

Tonight I found the final piece of the puzzle in this other set of instructions. The critical difference is that it says I need to have the power adapter plugged in for it to work which is what the Apple instructions say. What I don’t understand is why they made the power adapter a requirement. I can run both the LCD and an external display from batteries but just running an external display (with no power hungry backlight) requires even more power…

Now at some stage I will have to rearrange part of my desk (and probably clean up all the junk at the same time) in order to have a suitable place for my laptop while it is connected. Balancing on top of the rubbish bin at the end of my desk is just asking for trouble…

Technically there are no maps of Australia but there are satellite images. Unfortunately there aren’t any detailed images of the eastern suburbs which means I can’t look at my local area. However the western suburbs are covered better including locations such as the old Department of Defence Explosives Factory that I took photos of from the Maribyrnong River Path.

A lot of time was lost…

This afternoon my sister gave birth to a boy named Nathan which now makes me an uncle…

For the past four days I have been at Mudbash 2005, the first in four years with buggies, in which we (Nonarmi Rover Crew) entered our buggy; a Datsun 180B SSS coupe named The Last of the Japanese Four Cylinder Muscle Cars.

Unfortunately one of the spider gears within the differential sheared on the way back from the first event which meant that it was all over. Although I wasn’t too keen on driving any events I was looking forward to passengering :(

A few weeks ago I acquired a an old Toshiba Satellite 4090XCDT laptop that was being disposed of at work because it was both old and, more significantly, was playing up. I ended up spending a few hours this evening getting it back up and running for my sister to use.

The first issue I encountered was that I couldn’t get it to power up. After spending 15 minutes checking that the power adapter and the battery were ok I discovered a small switch. This switch is critical to what I was trying to do, turn the laptop on, as it locks the power button in place to prevent accidental usage. With the power button unlocked the laptop powered up immediately.

As the laptop had gone through the proper disposal procedures the hard drive had been wiped so my first task was to install an operating system. Windows was the only option based on the end user and also as that has all the supported drivers. Initially I considered Windows XP as the Celeron 400 CPU would tolerate it but after I found that it only had 64MB of RAM I decided to simply use the restore CD’s to install Windows 98.

This is where the major problems began to surface as Read the rest of this entry…