fun stuff
20
Mar 12
Meet the G4 Apple //c
[Welcome, RetroMacCast listeners!]
This is my latest Frankintosh project – housing a G4 Mac Mini in the case of an Apple //c. From all outward appearances, a stock Apple IIc or //c with a little wear and tear. Inside, it sports a 1.4GHz G4 with a gigabyte of RAM. A far cry from its original 1MHz 65C02 and 128K of RAM.
Everything you see is still fully functional. The original keyboard is rewired and run through an Arduino (Teensy) so it can be used as a USB keyboard for the Mini. I’ve also maintained many of the original ports, and repurposed a couple for updated peripherals. For instance, the mouse/joystick port has been wired up to a USB port on the Mini. To plug into this, an M0100 mouse has been fitted with the guts of an optical USB mouse, wired to the original 9-pin connector.
To attach to the original Apple monochrome display, I built a VGA adapter that outputs monochrome NTSC via RCA. Instructions and pinouts for the adapter were found here. To adjust the sync and refresh rate, I use SwitchResX.
You can see a complete gallery below (via Flickr)
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157628540220857″]
12
Nov 10
USB Floppy hack
see the rest here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/charles_mangin/sets/72157625250155063/
23
May 10
In which we discover that a “squirrel proof” feeder is not, in fact, “raccoon proof”
this morning, we awoke to discover that our squirrel proof bird feeder was lying on the porch, on its side, empty.
this feeder: http://squirrelproofbirdfeeder.com/products/e100.html – which has, so far, survived the combined efforts of several highly trained suburban assault squirrels. with some difficulty, they are able to extract one seed at a time, with their tongues. eventually, they give up and leave the sunflower seeds to the birds.
when we saw the state of the feeder, we were somewhat perplexed. there had been no strong winds. none of the hardware had failed. and there had been seeds in it as of last night.
then i took a look at the CritterCam footage from the incident.
after examining the footage, we’ve decided this is what happened:
shortly after image 1 was taken, the raccoons were able to lift the feeder off its hook and it dropped onto the porch (see image 2). the drop ejected some of the sunflower seeds.
the raccoons then proceeded for several minutes, according to the subsequent images, to roll the feeder around the porch between them, freeing the remaining seeds.
27
Jan 10
Apple’s new iCrotchshot
Apple has done it again. Not only have they come up with a really nice looking glass rectangle that does pretty much what all the other big glass rectangles out there do, only… you know… better…
…they’ve also created a whole new way to get strangers to stare at your crotch.
01
Apr 09
Conficker probably not a threat to Apple II users
from A2Central.com:
Conficker probably not a threat to Apple II users. this from their call to Symantec:
“you are probably safe though I really don’t know what an Apple II is.”