I moved. nice new apt. $1200 in the Inner Sunset district, pool and covered parking space is part of rent. nice 1 bedroom. dsl is getting moved over as we speak, hopefully it will be active at the new place late this week.

I got my laptop fixed. bought a motherboard off of ebay for $400, and installed it. everything works pretty well.

I bought a new carrying case for it, lots of nice padding. With the carrying case, it survived my trip up to Calgary (for C2K3). I drank way too much there, and you can see the results at http://www.sfobug.org/barf.jpg (That's me on the ground. Brian Poole is on the left, Daniel Hartmeier is behind me, and Kjell Wooding is on the right. I don't remember the girl-in-yellow's name.)

one thousand three hundred dollars. That is how much it will cost to get my laptop repaired. I told them to button her back up, and I'd pick it up that afternoon. I might as well get a new laptop.

I want a decent speed system, one that I can work on OpenBSD with. I like macs, and would prefer to keep one, but an x86 system wouldn't be bad either. P2 or P3, preferably enough horsepower for a free OS to play DVD's on.

I have a problem. My TiBook won't boot any more. Well, it mostly won't boot.

Here is where the problems began. I was at school, waiting for class to begin, and since I used my laptop on the train from work to school, my battery was decently low (10-20%). I decided to drain the battery all the way, and do a full recharge when I got home. I booted single user, mounted /tmp read-write, and started compiling random things (but not installing), to drain the battery. I killed it, buttoned up the laptop, and went to class. I got home, plugged her in, and went to sleep.

In the morning, I turned her on, so I could check my email and all of that, and it went (mostly fine). Then random bad things would happen. I would be in the middle of compiling something, and my machine would hard freeze. On boot, it would panic while detecting the hard drive. Not just regular panics, but it would freak out my screen as well (like half of the horizontal lines jumped up and to the right about 4 inches). Multi-line panic messages (when they should have been 1 line), hard freezes. Seemed to happen when I wrote to /usr. I did a dd scan (dd if=/dev/wd0c of=/dev/null) , and found 2 sequencial bad sectors. I powered her off, and ordered a new hard drive. That was the last time I could get her to boot properly.

A few weeks later the new hard drive came, so I called a friend who had the torx bits to open my TiBook, and we went to town on my lappie. Put in the new harddrive, pressed the powerbutton, and...........nothing. She ignored us. :( We pull the battery, and tried to boot just on mains. No dice.

My friend is an old time Mac user, and still is, so we try everything he can think of. Little reset button on the back, we worked that like a cheep...uhh.....dollar bill. We pull ram, and eventually get 2 boots out of it. Original RAM in the top slot, for the first one. And the other RAM in the top slot. (but neither combonation would happen again).

We were able to run the Apple Troubleshooting CD, both Extended and Basic tests, which claimed that all parts had either passed, or didn't exist (The only parts that didn't exist was the Airport, which I don't have). Curiously, in the "notes" section, it had the error code "POST/16/1".

I managed to find a site that listed some Apple boot errors, and 16 seems to hint at PMU (Power Management Unit), which seems logical, based on the evidence I have just presented.

The system is no longer under warrenty, as I bought it last December (1 year limited warrenty came with the system, and I did not spring for the extended warrenty)

*sigh* I guess it's time to take her into a professional, and get her repaired. Not looking forward to the costs on this one.

Hmmm...my laptop's hard drive died recently. :( I'm getting an IBM Travelstar 40G 4200RPM drive to replace it. I'm also getting real network cards to replace my crappy 3com cards (Netgear GA302T for those of you keeping score).

[rant] I hate crappy hardware. That's it, no more. No 3com ethernet cards, no NVIDIA video cards, no no-name componants. Now its only high quality kit for me. I am sick and tired of my gear going down because I saved $15.[/rant]. [rant part=2] It's Linux, not GNU/Linux. The GNU/ part is silent, you don't write it, or say it. Cause we all wish RMS would just shut up, and go away.[/rant]

Network card of choice: 100baseT: Intel/DEC 21143. Gig-e: Netgear GA302T. Harddrive: IBM or Maxtor. (So far, I have been fine with motherboard ide controllers, but so help me if I have to replace that too). Video Card: Matrox or ATI. Monitor: NEC, or Sony. RAM: Micron or Kingston. Mouse: Logictec optical wheel mouse. Keyboard: IBM. Soundcard: Soundblaster Live. I don't have very much experiance with motherboards, but I'm not very happy with ASUS. ABIT, Tyan, and Gigabyte all look promising. I don't think I'll get another i386 system, Macppc, Sparc64 or x86-64 (AMD Hammer) look excellent.

I can deal with broken software, I'm even helping to fix that, but no more broken hardware.


(Note: the Linux portion of my rant is to piss off GNU people. Has no relation with the rest of my post)

Stolen from one of my comments, here

I want to use [mplayer] It's (IMHO) the best media player out there. I like OpenBSD, but support for end-user stuff is limited (even more so than the arch problem). Free/OpenBSD ports system, just rules. I wish every OS can have it, it's SO easy, and is very intuitive. I have played a bit with netbsd, but it "feels" wrong. I suppose I just have to sit down and use it for a while. I wont run linux. I don't like the feel of it either. Nothing personal against linux developers/users, it's just not for me. I hate RedHat though, the worst distro I have tried. (Slackware, Debian, SuSE, RedHat) OS 9 is an improvement for media, but I've been so damn spoiled with a unix base, (and I left the Mac camp in 1994 to run unix, just a recent return) I won't (by choice) run a non-unix operating system.

I think I'll wipe my laptop this weekend, and try OpenBSD on it, and give NetBSD a shot. I'll even try the FreeBSD PPC port.

I just had my first system crash in OS X. I have had apps crash, and classic compat mode crash, but never an OS crash. Until today. I was trying to reboot, cause I noticed my system got a little unstable, and it dumped into the debuger. Ohh, well...MUCH better uptime than my Windows machines, but not quite as good as my OpenBSD or FreeBSD systems. I'm thinking of putting OpenBSD, or NetBSD on my laptop, but I want there to be Mac binary compatability. The libraries aren't a problem, I have a legal copy of OSX. Something like Wine. I doubt Apple would be to happy with something like that. I know there is a Linux version of that at http://www.maconlinux.org I wonder what apps are OS X only that I use. Esp, with no equivalent in BSD. Well....there's only one way to find out...;-)

I ordered a DXR3 and a Creative 6x DVD drive from eBay, and it arrived yesterday. I put them into my FreeBSD system, and it boots. I havn't gotten to test the DXR3, but I think I have to add drivers for it. I'm working on getting the DVD drive to access DVD disks, but I think I'm not sending it the right paramaters. Spend about 30 minutes, including installing the hardware, so I'll spend some real time dealing with it this weekend.

FreeBSD 4.5 was tagged -RELEASE today, so I'm going to CVSup the source, and upgrade my machine. I'm having problems with the make installworld part on /bin/sh, but I think that's tree unstability, I'll delete /usr/src, then CVSup tonight, and try it again.

I saw the article on Slashdot about 1TB for $5k, and I'm seiously thinking about it. We have tons of MP3's, and DiVX movies, and that will fill up the 20G drive that is storing the information right now.

I just got a new Apple Titanium PowerBook G4. 550Mhz processor, 256Meg RAM, 20 Gig hard drive, 10/100/1000baseT ethernet, 56k modem, SVideo out, SVGA out, Firewire (IEEE-1384), dual USB, DVD-ROM =)

I just love OSX. It's my new friend. Plenty fast (and will be faster with some tweaks I'm investigating) and has added the command line, which IMO was the only thing that Mac's have been missing.

Had to add some apps to it before I started digging it bigtime. The main one was ASM, which is the Application Switching Menu. It adds a menu in the upper-right corner of the screen, that allows you to choose which application to show. It's re-adding the feature from OS 7-9. They have a few bugs to work out, but other than that, it works as promised.

April 10 2002: I bumped the RAM up to 512. OSX is at 10.1.3. It's faster now =)

I just got a new computer P3/500 256MRAM/8G hard drive, 36xcdrom, 12x8x24 cd-rw, and a sweet-ass 17" monitor. I loaded OpenBSD 3.0 on it, and I'm digging it. I may put FreeBSD on it so I can have more games and stuff.

We also got DSL (1.5/128) to the apartment, so I built a nice little OpenBSD firewall. Invisible bridging is cool...=) I'm in the process of moving my domain name over, and that will be super cool when that finishes. (God bless static ip's)

Bought a 40Gig hard drive from BestBuy for $70 after rebates ($100+tax in store). Outstanding deal, and I'm gonna buy a bit more ram.

My roommate screwed up her iMac yesterday, and since I haven't used any Mac for 6 years (and haven't used MacOS 9 at all) I can't really fix it. She doesn't care if we wipe it, so she's gonna buy more ram, and that 40G hard drive, and we're gonna put OSX on it. YAY! Gonna spend monday on it, cause the girlfriend is in class.

I am currently playing Legacy of Kain:Soul Reaver for PS1, Final Fantasy 9 for PS1, Black and White for PC, and Gex 3 for PS1.

Soul Reaver is the best game I have played since Marathon for the Mac. Easy to start out, but can get nicely complicated once you get used to it. The "assistance" isn't intrusive, and it generally useful. The storyline leaves something to be desired, but with I'll let that slide based on the quality of gameplay. Most games these days have piss-poor storylines anyways, so that's just a bonus.

Final Fantasy 9 is another sweet game. I'm on the 4th disk, and I am just killing Grand Dragons, trying to level. Yes, I know the Mu's give more Exp, but until I can block/defeat/cause-it-not-to-happen their Snort ability, I'm gonna vist them rarely.

Black and White gets frustrating at times. I think I need a desk and a table top with comfortable chairs for that game. Right now, the monitor is on a crate, and I sit on the floor with the keyboard on my legs, and the mouse next to me on the floor. I just don't have the patience to deal with my friggin pet. He's stupid. =P

Gex 3 is a great diversion from the other games. I'm not treating it as an epic style game, but as a quick distraction, which is probably why I've mostly stoped playing. I've beaten all of the easy and intermediate levels, and the expert levels aren't the distraction that I'm looking for.

Gaming systems I own: Old Skool NES, SuperNES, Playstaion One, Windows ME with P3 900, 384 ram, geforce 2 mx graphics, DVD and a CD-R.

Gaming systems I want to own: Sega Genisis, N64, Playstation Two, Game Cube, Dreamcast, G4 Tower(not just for gaming).

We took the afternoon off on Friday to see this movie. It was great. This was the only movie to do a Matrix parody, and not suck while doing it. This was subtly stupid, and not over-the-top lame, so it was excellent. I wonder how many times they said the 'F' word in this. I guess I'll have to watch it with a counter and finger it out by hand.