Dead Mac

The mini tower died this week. Wouldn't even boot up into Mac OS 9.2. It was from Freecycle so I wasn't too upset over it. Fired up the other G3, moved the RAM and hard drive over and booted into Linux on that one. I discovered that you can't get a resolution higher than 800 x 600 with the AV personality card installed. Take it out and the same set up will go to 1024 x 720 (or whatever it is. You get the drift.) I don't know why this is, but I could repeat it on the Mac by removing it, booting up and getting the higher resolution. Then I'd put it back in and it was back to low res. I also bought a Marble Mouse, so I could switch over to the USB keyboard I bought. Which lead to something else interesting. Mac OS 9.2 does not see the USB ports until after BootX comes up. Which means that you can't choose to boot into Linux using a USB mouse and keyboard. Neither one works. You have to plug in an ADB mouse, boot up and choose Linux, then unplug that mouse. It's crazy but it works. It's amazing how much I get done with worn out hardware.

I did some upgrades and was able to try out Wyrd and Tomboy a bit. Wyrd is a front end for Remind and is pretty cool for text based stuff. I love the idea of Remind in principle. In practice, I haven't learned enough commands to really use the program. One of these days, I might actually get to try out some of the stuff I'd like to learn. Tomboy is a simple wiki program. I like the looks of it, but it does seem to have some of the drawbacks that the early Note Studio had. You can't pull up a list of pages you've made. I'll hack around with this a bit more and maybe post some screenshots. I do like wikis. It doesn't look like you can export these, so it's not something you can sync with a Palm. It does show progress towards making nice, user-friendly Linux apps.