This Powerbook 150 was purchased as a simple media reader. Once the hard drive failed the owner decided to replace it with a compact flash card since IDE adapters were available. There was a problem: the ATA device driver would probe the device and then immediately shutdown because the “identify device” bit wasn’t the expected value. The device driver had been written before more recent changes to the ATA spec. Greg solved the problem by constructing a daughter card that plugs into the adapter board’s 40-pin header and then flips the identifying bit when the device is initially probed.

[thanks iamdigitalman]

Continue reading “Powerbook Compact Flash Drive” →

[calhoun] has been scratch building some great mac based MAME cabinets. His first one was a cocktail (pictured above) built from a Powerbook and using an I-PAC to interface with the arcade controls. The motherboard and hard drive are mounted to a fold down plexiglass tray. The speakers come from the Apple “globe” speakers. This is just the first model, he’s built several bar-top cabinets and is constantly trying to improve the design.

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Yes there’s still a how-to this week, even though we pretty much how-to’ed a hack-cake yesterday for our HADA01 celebration.  Here’s the low down on today’s how-to up on engadget:

I bought an older graphite 400 mhz G4 tower from ebay.de (germany is a great place to buy tech here in europe) a while back. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed “Sawtooth”, are really good (i.e. there weren’t huge amounts of AGP G4’s that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading I learned that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. I decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: I was not payed by Powerlogix nor did I receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After having a really hard time getting this proc upgrad to work, I just  wanted to put this information out there to help who it may as clearly as possible, after all I never enjoy seeing macs in the trash (unless I get to take them home and adopt them!)

Click to read “How-To: Upgrade the processor on an older macintosh G4” on engadget

Continue reading “How-To: Upgrade The Processor On An Older Macintosh G4” →

The author purchased a box of 8 Apple //e main boards at auction for a dollar each. He then assembled this simple crate for them to live in. He wanted to use the burn-in connectors to supply power but they weren’t consistent. Power is delivered to the buses through a threaded rod along the bottom. Each board is net-booted by a more equipped Apple //e. It is a unique project, but I can’t think of what you would do with it.

[thanks exparrot]

Continue reading “AppleCrate: Apple II Based Cluster” →

Our friends over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog decided reinforce their name by trying out the OSX86. After some bumbling they got it installed (I don’t think they’re going to be Linux converts anytime soon). Conclusion? They were thoroughly impressed that it worked and how incredibly slow it was, deciding that it needed some more tweaking. I’m just happy someone else did this before I had to bite the bullet and sacrifice my only running laptop in the name of hacking.

Continue reading “TUAW Trys Out OSX86” →

It looks like old Pentium boxes aren’t the only systems being relegated to web server duties. This is a supposedly easy install of Debian ‘woody’. The Linux distro can not be booted directly and needs to be started from OS 7.5.3. The guide gives some handy tips on what security upgrades need to be installed. I’m guessing most highschools finally threw these out last year, but you may still luck out.

[thanks MarkDavid]

Continue reading “Mac SE/30 Linux Web Server” →