Fun with silly computers

The blue and white G3 proved to be even more unstable after the Tiger upgrade. So I've retired it in favour of a Dell Optiplex GX240. It's an elderly small form factor machine with a 1.7ghz P4, 384mb RAM and a 20gb hard drive, but only USB 1.1 ports. Also the CD drive is a laptop style one and it only has half-height PCI slots which I was hoping to populate with a USB 2 card.

However I found that I had a USB 2 card that fitted, but the rear panel was full height. This was 'solved' by removing the panel and securing the card with duct tape. After next pay day I'll track down a proper half-height USB 2 card. I didn't realise that it wasn't until the GX260 that they had proper PCI slots.

Despite these problems it runs Windows XP nicely enough and seems stable. I've also found that I can connect to it via RDP from Linux without rerouting the audio from the sound card, which is perfect. However, I have encountered a problem I hadn't considered. My iPod is a 3G model, the one with the four buttons under the screen. It can't be charged from USB, only FireWire, which the Dell doesn't have. I guess I could put a FireWire card in instead of the USB, but can you get half-height ones? It's either that or find a broken 4G iPod to put the hard drive out of the 3G one in. Either way it'll have to wait until next payday.

I never thought that the day would come when I would be buying Dell hardware. But Macs are too expensive for what you get, and I've lost interest in building computers from scratch.

I didn't expect to be using Linux as the primary OS on my main computer either. It's always been a side project for me, and I haven't been without a Linux machine in some form for over ten years, but it's never been my main OS until now. The reasoning is that this machine has a Windows 2000 CoA sticker, but 2000 is old and doesn't run very well on this machine. Windows Vista would run OK but it's too expensive and the first service pack isn't out yet and XP is hard to get hold of and again, expensive. A Mac? Yeah, it would be nice and I still really like Mac OS X, but I can't afford one with an Intel processor, so there isn't much point. So the obvious solution was Ubuntu, specifically the Gutsy Gibbon pre-release. I've been running it since one of the early Tribe releases and it's been absolutely fine. It runs far better than Windows 2000 on this machine and has more up-to-date features.

This probably seems like a cop-out to those who seem to regard it as a matter of honour to have as much cracked and pirated software as possible and run it on a cracked version of Windows, but these days I just can't be arsed. Free software works for me. For Windows, there's Ubuntu, for MS Office, there's OpenOffice, for IE, there's FireFox and for Photoshop, there's the GIMP. The only thing I can't do so far on Linux is run Ableton Live, which I do miss, and Bryce, which I haven't used for a while anyway. And who knows, there might be open-source equivalents that I haven't found yet, though that is doubtful when it comes to Live. Blender is supposed to be good, but I found it very hard to use when I looked into it a couple of years ago.

One day I'll be able to get a Mac again, and that day will be glorious. The one I really miss is my Pismo PowerBook, which suffered some sort of power manager failure. It accompanied me to Paris and New York and was the platform for some crazy music creation due to the excellent sound circuitry in it.

Didn't go to badminton tonight due to being headachy and tired, and I'm also insanely poor so I'm treasuring the diesel I have the Discovery as I can't afford to fill it up. I also desperately want to put new strings on the Peavey bass, but I can't afford that either, and so-on and so-forth.

Wow, saving sucks.