Monthly Archives: July 2008

Only because I’m out of Purple Stuff

Posted by TD on July 7, 2008 1 comment

Sunny Delight and vodka get along pretty well, though there’s a definite “drinking in high school” vibe to it.

Quote of the Day

Posted by TD on July 5, 2008 No comments

pdb: you’re like the louis awerbuck of boozing

Go Team Me!

Posted by TD on July 5, 2008 3 comments

Came up with a silly but ultimately successful workaround for installing Mac OS X 10.4 onto that ancient G3 tower. What should be a simple process was complicated by a confluence of awkward limitations:

  • My copy of 10.4 is on DVD, while the G3 only has a CD-ROM drive. A new DVD drive would cost more than the computer is worth, so I’m not buying one.
  • The B&W (blue and white) G3s don’t support booting from either USB or FireWire devices, thus preventing me from installing via my external USB DVD drive. This also ruled out using the G5′s DVD drive in Target Disk Mode.
  • Speaking of Target Disk Mode, the B&W G3s don’t support it, so I couldn’t install from the G5 to the G3 by mounting the G3′s disk as an external hard drive.
  • The OS X installer doesn’t seem to support installing onto external USB hard drives, which foiled plan #3: pulling the hard drive from the G3, putting it into an external enclosure, and installing OS X onto the drive from my G5 system. This probably would have worked if I’d had a FireWire-equipped enclosure handy, which of course I did not.

So, here’s what I ended up doing:

  1. Install 10.3 from CDs, with the hard drive divided into a large main partition and a little 3 GB partition.
  2. Hook up the external DVD drive and use Disk Utility to “restore” the 10.4 install DVD onto the 3-gig partition.
  3. Wait for-EVAR for the copy to finish. I was copying a 2.8 GB disk image onto a hard drive via a USB 1.1 connection. Ponderous, man. Fuckin’ ponderous. (someone please get that reference!)
  4. Set the Mac to boot from the second partition.
  5. Reboot and use the 10.4 installer to put 10.4 on the main partition.
  6. Use the little 3-gig partition for an OS 9 installation. Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Shadow Warrior, and Warcraft II, here I come!

This 9-year-old box actually provides useable performance with 10.4. It’s not blazing fast, by any means, but it’ll do basic web browsing/email/IMing. I can easily overclock it from 350 MHz up to a blazing 400 MHz once I dig out the appropriately-sized jumper from my spare parts bin, and I’m sure I have a few sticks of suitable RAM lying around somewhere. Right now it’s running on 512 MB. Or perhaps “walking” is the more appropriate term.

In any case, I managed to get it working without spending a dime, so I’m happy.

TD is getting sick of this shit.

Posted by TD on July 5, 2008 8 comments

I seem fated to share my life with extraordinarily difficult creatures. I did, after all, date Squeaky for awhile :-)

But lately Clancy’s been the one giving me trouble. I bought him one of these:

 cat house

And one of these:

 scratching post

And for good measure, one of these:

 scratching pad

Little fucker won’t touch ANY of ‘em. Instead I have a bunch of torn-up rugs all over the house, and my shoes look like this:

 my shoes

Argh.

Get Yer Daily Lulz

Posted by TD on July 3, 2008 No comments

Over at MauserMedic’s.

Random Chatter

Posted by TD on July 3, 2008 7 comments
  • Breda rescued me from intense early-morning boredom (supervising a computer lab populated by precisely zero (0) students) via Google Talk/Jabber.
  • Breda’s awesome (she asked me to let you know that), even though she thinks lemon party a well-known shock site is “kind of sweet.” She gave me a list of a few good beers to try, since apparently I’ve been doing it wrong. Who knew that Milwaukee’s Best isn’t really the best?
  • I rescued an old Blue & White G3 Power Mac from the scrap heap yesterday but I don’t know what to do with the damn thing. Music server? Retro gaming rig? Another OpenBSD box? Getting 10.4 onto it would be problematic, requiring either a new DVD drive, a set of 10.4 CDs, or an external Firewire enclosure for its hard drive.
  • Still waiting for my CZ 85 to come back. I’m guessing it’s out for plating right now. But oh, will it be good.

That’s all I got. Here’s Warren Zevon doing “Lawyers, Guns and Money”: