this post failed to be posted at facebook, 1011pm 6 january 2010
I blogged much whinge-ing about my sorry state of affairs last night. I tried to import the blog, but facebook said 'no.' I could've copy/pasted it, but I've decided to re-write it instead.
Tonight I'm on a different trip, thanks to some reflective passages in books from Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs.
Rather than hating on what doesn't work anymore, I'm appreciating what I got that still functions. I don't intend to go on a horn-tooting solo, but I am thankful to all that is for letting me have any tools that haven't failed.
At the top of the list of what's working as intended: the open source miracle that is XBMC - that I've been using to defeat old NES/SNES games in emulators and watch cartoons, movies, and other stuff on in the meantime...
Any whiner knows it's easiest to describe what hasn't been working -
so here's what I've been burning brainwaves puzzling out during the past 24 hours:
Last night I assembled the - literally - crumbling system of old mac-ness, sourced from goodwill parts and craigslist bargains. The monitor is still held together with tape (clear, because by that point in packing-up-to-move I'd exhausted all supply of duct tape) and hope.
I remember rolling the beige plastic in my arms, turning the tape around and around the shape of it, confused and disbelieving my eyes and ears, but witnessing it’s housing crumble for no reason. I simply taped it up and put it on a bare bookshelf near the rest of the growing stack of piles in our garage - waiting for the moving truck in the chill minnesotan springtime weather.
The monitor sits on top of the cpu housing. Too bad it's from before zip drives were standard on macs. For that brief time in which they were, anyway...
This model has just a floppy slot and a 2x cdrom. The cpu, one of apple's first powerpc chips, hums along at a blazing 100 mhz. I bet I could up the ram, tho.
I know in one of the half dozen boxes of electronic flotsam in the closet, I have a small assortment of mac ram sticks. I pondered seeking them out, since I'm no longer in a clime where they'd be useful for scraping thick ice off car windows, and seeing if I could improve the speed of 2700 dpi slide scans with more dam ram.
No...the treachery didn't lie in the usual suspects this time. I hustled the scanned untitled, numerically sequential tiff files from the paltry little 3/4 gb hard drive to zip disks via scsi.
Then from the clear blue usb zip to my main desktop mac. But oh...oops. Yeah, every website and reference you can check will tell you usb zip drives are supposed to be supported without drivers in mac os x.
What they don't tell you is that 100mb zip disks and drives are dinosaurs no one even tries to sell anymore. They float through thrift stores at pennies on the dollar. And plugging in your usb 100mb zip drive will get you nothing.
Maybe if you reboot with it connected to the usb port, and turned ON...it might auto-detect it like it claims it already does/will. But I didn't have time for that.
With the mini out as a place to shuttle my untitled 20-30 mb tiff files to...I fetched out my old ibook, dusted her off, and got to work.
See I also would've hustled this - still admittedly rather sweet looking "toilet-seat" aka "hello kitty purse" ibook. But the airport card - the old pre-extreme airport card that became rare when apple stopped making it...it causes the keyboard to bow upwards.
So you can have either a wireless laptop, or a keyboard that functions. Not both. So the value of it plummets for the average noob. Add to this that before I even had a wireless card for it, back in the day when I just attached a blue ethernet cable I kept across the back of my desk...it had already started to lose function in its cd drive.
I found myself able to get the pics on to the ibook's 9gb hard drive. It's just that every attempt since then has resulted in varying levels of frustration. And I've tried many different things only a geek might appreciate.
First I tried my 1gb poker chip usb stick. Every try it told me the disk was full. The ibook's sure isn't, and the usb stick isn't either. I ejected it, reinserted it...tried again. It'd start the 2nd time, but get 2 mb into the transfer and fail...beachballing to eternity.
I'd let it sit for a few minutes, confirming we were borked, and then restart, withdrawing the usb stick after the chime/bong sound.
After the first usb stick, I tried 2 others. Same effects completely.
This caused me to try running disk utility and repair permissions. I did so, it appeared to find some nominal permissions errors on internet plug-ins used for streaming video. I'd never be surprised to find that adobe nee macromedia flash is a virus. I've often said it is one.
After the repair permissions came up clean and green, I rebooted and tried again. No usb. Same thing.
I tried connecting my 40gb ipod. No. It refused to mount it, despite it being activated for 'disk use', without starting itunes. Then of course, since it's an old ass laptop with 10.3 on it, itunes went beachbally and got borked.
So I had to wait a bit, confirm my suspicions of borkitude, and reboot again.
Nothing's let me mount the disk portion of my ipod on the clamshell ibook.
I tried to connect my firewire dvd burner. It saw it, recognized the model, read a disc and told me the dye identifier code and speed designation. As soon as I tried to burn, it failed and went beachball spinny again.
I wouldn't be so bummed if I hadn't been practicing too aggressively with my file-move protocol. I've already deleted the original files from the itty bitty power mac 7500 hard drive. They exist, of course, and could be 'un-deleted'. But they're all moved over to the ibook.
Short of uploading them to the internet, you know, if the files will even do *that*, I am perplexed. I wonder if the I/O controller is damaged. If I could wrangle out the hard drive, put it in a new firewire enclosure, and mount it...it might be okay.
I'm left with the three options:
a) undelete the files from the source drive and move them to something less unstable than my old useless ibook. then break it down into parts and hustle them b-tches on ebay and use the profits to buy a wii, a big NAS drive, or a new monitor.
b) configure closed network to allow ibook net access, and bitterly-sardonically laugh as the files fail to upload from the dead old b-stard of an ibook.
c) hustle files back from ibook on usb zip disks and onto something else that might read them. including but not limited to: the old zombie mac desktop tower that may or may not boot, and the final possibility - the heretofore untread ground of the wife's laptop.
Whenever I get done slamming my head against the wall, I'll let you know if I find anything that works.
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