Woo! I had to go to the back of a very odd location in Pontiac to actually be able to pick up the Mac Pro, but it’s now in the trunk of my car. Since it was signature required and I wouldn’t be home to collect it, I made arrangements to pick it up. Thankfully a rather strong, very friendly person carried it out for me and placed it in the trunk of the car.
Now I want to go home. :D
AHT Successfully Run on Power Mac G5Before I list it on eBay, is anyone interested in my Power Mac G5?
$1500, delivered if you live in the Detroit-ish area.
· Dual PowerPC G5 2.0 GHz
· 3.5GB RAM
· 320GB Hard Disk
· Mighty Mouse, Keyboard, Brand New Apple Mouse
· Retail Boxed Mac OS X 10.4
· Works perfectly, very well cared for.
Nintendo DS Browser (Opera for Nintendo DS)Guess what’s out? Yep, Opera for the Nintendo DS. Inside the package is a huge manual, Memory Expansion Pak [sic], and the software cartridge itself.
It seems to work pretty well thus far, although it doesn’t appear to support Flash, as Meatspin just didn’t display. Nor did YouTube content. Poopy. Google Maps seems to work, just very slowly. I haven’t had a chance to try Gmail yet.
UPDATE: Gmail seems to work fine. And I purchased it at Target for $29.99. I had called a GameStop earlier and the person answering the phone quoted a price of $34.99 and insisted that it must be preordered, and that there is no other way to get it on Wednesday.
Rack, cabled, ready to go.Last night, in preparation for the coming (on the 6th, I hope) Mac Pro I decided to re-cable my office. Back in 2003 just before I first acquired my Power Mac G5 (photo gallery retired) (when the Power Mac G4 Cube (photo gallery retired) was my only Mac) I set up my office in what is generally its current configuration, with the large O’Sullivan Diplomat L-shaped desk, black wire rack, torch lamp, vertical bookshelf, etc.
Since then I’ve changed things slightly, but most of what I’ve done is just add on additional cruft (cabling) to the things without pulling out much of the unused stuff. Well, last night I pulled out a large pile of various cables from both behind my desk and behind the rack and cleaned everything up. I also pulled the VCR out of the stack, moved the DV bridge to beneath the computer, eliminated the USB 1.1 and FireWire hubs, etc.
With all this cabling done in the rack I was able to directly plug everything in smoothly, and the Mac Pro should fit in just as well. Beyond the MP, the rack also holds a JetDirect, HP LaserJet 5L, Formac StudioTVR (TV Tuner / DV Bridge), APC SmartUPS 1400, USB 2.0 hub, and two external hard disks. This is connected to the desk via a cable trunk which maintains a 1″ separation or right-angle crossing between data cables and power lines. On the desk there is a USB 2.0 hub, iPod cable, USB 2.0 CF/SD reader, speakers, LCD, keyboard, and mouse. It is all connected without any cables hanging on the floor or even visible beneath the desk, just how I like it. (I’ll post photos of the wholly done office once it’s… done.)
Hopefully tonight I’ll be able to finish moving everything to compact fluorescent lighting too. Right now I’ve got a 30W Sunwave full spectrum bulb in a lamp on the desk, but I need to redo the diffuser for it. A coworker gave me some 14W bulbs I’ll use in the ceiling fan in place of the extra-hot halogens, and I’ll move the torch lamp to some manner of CF spotlight. I’m putting X10 controls back on all lighting (except the ceiling fan), and I’ll probably put an X10 switchplate next to the normal one.
Then it’ll just be a matter of dusting a bit more, straightening up things in the closet, and waiting for the Mac Pro to arrive and I’ll be done with my office. Yay!
Well, thanks to the help of a friend I now have a Mac Pro on the way to me at a rather nice price. I’ve also ordered the extra RAM it needs to fit my needs. In the end it’ll be a quad core Xeon 2.66 GHz box with 3GB of RAM, 1x250GB and 4x320GB hard disks (two internal, two external for backups), and all my old peripherals.
That said, I’m now selling my Power Mac G5. If any of you are interested, I’ll give you first crack at it. I’m asking US$1500, and it is as follows:
Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 (PowerPC)
3.5GB RAM
2x 160GB Hard Disk
DVD Writer (SuperDrive)
All Original Software (Yes, I can ensure that Classic is on it.)
OS X 10.4 (Legal, Licensed, Boxed Retail Copy which I had purchased separately)
All original packaging, accessories, and cabling.
Apple Mighty Mouse
It’s been real well cared for, hasn’t left the air conditioned / non-smoking room it’s been housed in since I got it, and hasn’t ever had any problems. All but 512MB of the RAM was purchased from Crucial and is under their lifetime warranty.
I will ship it anywhere in the world, but please remember that the Power Mac G5s are mighty heavy. The case is beautiful, but it’s also a large hunk of solid aluminum.
This machine makes for a great photo / video editing workstation and is probably a bit overpowered for normal desktop use. Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, all of those run great on it.
Oh, and it will run OS X 10.5 which is slated to be released this year — buying this machine isn’t a dead end of any sort.
My new-ish network setup.While the Airport Express + Cable Modem beneath the couch setup I put together back in January was working well for a while, within the last two weeks or so it’s started to become especially problematic. Last night I put a call into Comcast because the connection seemed to be dying fairly regularly. And by regularly, I mean many times per day. Eventually yesterday came around and I couldn’t really get it to come back at all.
After I had a case submitted and an appointment scheduled for next Saturday I did a bit more digging and found the actual problem: neither of my Apple Airport Expresses would link any more. I had this problem with one of them a while back, but I’d sort of forgotten about it. Now the other one was refusing to link.
Thinking that it was an autonegotiation problem I flipped it to 100/Full and that fixed the problem for about six hours. After that the PC light on the cable modem once again went out (indicating no link), would no longer light after many reboots / resets of each device. I then brought out my laptop and found that there were no problems linking to there. I tried a few other devices and the cable modem could link with them as well. Then I knew the problem was the Airport Expresses.
Since I don’t currently own a device which has AppleCare they are both out of warranty. With the Somerset Apple Store being closed I had to either pay full price (I normally get Student Discount), wait a week for shipping, or drive out to the Apple Store in 12 Oaks Mall. Fortunately today found me leaving work early to run down to the RenCen to pick some things up, and with me downtown at 2:15pm, I figured it wouldn’t be too far out of the way to swing by Novi on the way home.
While I hit a few slow bits of traffic (I-94 between I-75 and I-96), most of it moved surprisingly well. I-696 was horribly backed up going westbound, but not where I was going.
Anyway, long story short, things are working much better now. The shared hard disk thing is interesting (mounts HFS+ and FAT32, at the very least, but partitions can’t be edited), the built-in switch has allowed me to use my JetDirect, wired network on the G5 (hopefully Mac Pro soon), and provide a link for the workbench. I’ve had no dropped connections at all, and the Airport Expresses are all set up as clients of the main base station (no WPA) to save on bandwidth, and music can stream out as desired.
Also, since ceasing to use Twitter I have not missed it. At all. In fact, I forgot about its existence until I saw an article about it a few hours ago.
I’m glad it’s gone. It’s irritating.
UPDATE: Also, something else I don’t miss is Apple’s Safari. I switched to Firefox 2.something on my Mac a while ago, and it’s really quite nice. Even though the spell checker isn’t consistent with the rest of the OS, widgets look odd, and QuickTime doesn’t play well with it, it’s still a great improvement.
Kensington Expert Mouse on my desk at work.Yesterday while at CompUSA to see if there were any interesting / good prices on items I wanted (as part of their 50% – 70% off everything going-out-of-business sale) I came across a Kensington Expert Mouse for US$50. I’ve been wanting to try one of these for a few years now, but it’s high $100 price put me off. Well, at that price I couldn’t pass it up, so I purchased one.
That said, I’m not sure I like it. I think it’s the tilted-back position it naturally rests in, and maybe a combination of the sensitivity I need to set it at in order to feel natural, but after an hour or so of use the back of my hand begins to ache.
Also, installation of its drivers appears to have somehow disabled the Alp touchpad driver for my laptop. Part of this driver compensates for unintended brushes of the touchpad, so they aren’t turned into inadvertent mouse clicks. The software also allows one to assign the buttons to send combinations of keyboard presses, but I can’t seem to make it send things like Windows-D (Show Desktop) on Windows XP, or any of the Dashboard or Expose keys on OS X.
Beyond the thing mentioned above (which may be resolvable with some repositioning, acceleration adjustment, and noodling with drivers / software, I’ve taken to it pretty quickly. It doesn’t seem to work so well when doing PCB CAD.
I think that after a few days of trying it I’ll decide if I’m going to keep it or not. As these regularly sell on eBay for prices around (if not higher than) what I paid for it, selling it will just be a hassle and a financial wash. No money lost, really.
Now, to try and fix the Alps driver problem. That’ll be a real big issue for me if I can’t get it working, as my hands regularly pass right over the touchpad whenever I’m typing.
UPDATE: Reinstalling the Alps driver and rebooting has restored it’s functionality. Judicious playing with the acceleration profiles for both slow and fast movement of the trackball has helped make it easier to position things. Now, to give it a day or so of use.
Well, for one, I got the Honda Music Link passing audio. Yes, it’s working. However, not in all modes… and I came across a case where the data I was keying off of — the checksum of the packets — has a collision. So I need to find a different way to do it all.
That said, I need some help. Can any of you point me to software which will open a serial port, listen to data, and allow me to send things in hex? Eltima Serial Port Monitor works great, but the trial has expired and the software is $70! That’s… a lot for just hobby uses.
Thank you. :)
I’m having some problems with a subroutine in the small program I’ve been working on mikroBasic for the Honda Music Link stuffs I’ve been doing.
Could any of you help me?
To start, here’s a copy of the program in a text file: hml_mikrobasic_help.txt
Here’s the project itself, zipped up: hml_mikrobasic_help.zip
The IDE / compiler itself, mikroBasic, is available here.
(I’m just using the demo version, and the limit is only on code size, so feel free to install it. I don’t come anywhere near the code limit, and when one does it’s rather obvious, as the compiler just refuses to compile it.
The problem I’m having is with sendCommand(), and specifically the variable iPodCommand, which is the first one passed to it. What I expect to happen is that whatever is passed as the first argument to sendCommand() will be set and available within the procedure. Instead, I seem to be getting something else.
As the program is currently listed, I would expect the output sendCommand(powerOn, 0) to be 0xFF 0x55 0x04 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x04 0xF8. However, the output I receive is 0xFF 0x55 0x02 0xFE 0xB9 0x47.
The expected packet is broken down as follows:
0xFF – Header 1
0x55 – Header 2
0x04 – Data Length
0x00 – Data 1
0x00 – Data 2
0x00 – Data 3
0x04 – Data 4
0x08 – Checksum (0x100 – Data Length – All Data Packets)
The received packet breaks down this way:
0xFF – Expected Header 1
0x55 – Expected Header 2
0x02 – Length appropriate if the constant referenced by iPodCommand were two bites in length.
0xFE – Data 1 (Not sure where this comes from.)
0xB9 – Data 2 (This one neither…)
0x47 – Checksum, calculated properly off of unexpected Data bytes.
When I run things through the hardware debugger I’m not seeing the variable iPodCommand as an array, and I’m not sure why or how (it just shows a value of 0xDF). That, though, and it’s not working as expected, is leading me to believe that I’m doing something wrong in setting up sendCommand().
So, could any of you please help me? I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Thanks!
