Hal O'Brien

By way of the BrainPickings Twitter feed:

USB typewriters.

Mind you, they want about $500 for them. But they also sell an $18 DIY kit, so you can take an old (cheap) typewriter from a thrift store and make it spew the 1s and 0s of our time.

After giving me a window of 3-5 days to get Minimax back, the Southcenter Apple Store called last night and said it was ready. I've picked it up, and everything appears to be doing well. 1 day turnaround is pretty good.

In an interesting way of setting what the marketing jargon calls a "reference price," they printed up a receipt to let me know this Main Logic Board replacement would have cost $617.81 had the machine not been under warranty. That's about as much as it cost new. No, nobody's trying to sell an Applecare extension, why do you ask?

Now comes the most difficult part of trying to fix an intermittent problem like this: Waiting to see if it goes wrong again, while realizing early success may only be a Black Swan.

Oddest side effect found so far: My serial number isn't in System Profiler any more. It only says,

"Serial Number (system): System Serial#"

Having kept all my receipts, though, I think that'll be OK.

He's a little obsessed about a certain phone that 97% of cell phone shoppers and 87% of "smartphone" shoppers don't buy... But the New York Times' David Pogue, in his end-of-the-year roundup of tech calls our attention to something that's kind of nifty: "Readability", a... well, it's not a plug-in, it's not an add-on, it's more of a redirector.

The easiest way to explain is by illustration, thus this picture. On the left is a sample page from About.com, a site known for loading the page with visual junk. On the right is what happens to the page after Readability takes its swing at it -- much cleaner, much more readable, even (dare one say it) useful.

Definitely worth taking a look at.

xkcd gets the linux mindset right on the money.

Obligatory cutesy name for my new Mac: Minimax. Because it was the least worst option...

Like nomi, it's been a bit gadget-heavy around here lately. There are many components to that, but I'll talk about the big one.

See, back about... Oh, I think it must've been New Years' Eve or so, someone in our apartment complex left a Macintosh Performa 630CD out by the trash. It had a note on it, reading (more or less), "Works great, we just don't need it any more. Feel free to take."

So I looked at this a while. I've always had more curiosity than wallet when it came to the Mac platform. Still, I had no real experience with it, and ya wanna talk about a pig in a poke...

I left the computer there. Overnight. Two nights, I think.

It rained.

So the poor little Mac is still out there, water drops beading on it, and I figure, aw, what the hell.

I take it inside, plug it in... And sum-bitch, it powers up. The glass on the monitor is cold enough I have to keep wiping condensation off, but it powers up.

Since then, it's been a bit of a thrill ride to see just how far I can push the envelope, upgrade-wise. Because it's not like I can leave well enough alone. To give you an idea, here's a table:

.	Original Spec	Upgrade Spec
Processor	68040, 33MHz	PowerPC 601, 75MHz
Memory	8MB	64MB
Hard drive	250MB	6GB
CD-ROM speed	2x	12x
Networking	None	Asante Ethernet card
Mac OS	7.5.5	9.1

Some of that isn't finished yet -- I'm waiting on the memory and the OS 9.1 CD. But it gives you an idea of just how major an overhaul I'm doing. And it doesn't even mention that I had to buy a new keyboard, because the old one had stuck keys.

Like I say, it's been fun. I get to tinker, and re-build.

But what does this have to do with propeller beanies?, I hear you ask.

Well... Bill Watterson once had a three week thread -- 18 strips -- in Calvin and Hobbes. And it was all about how Calvin found out one day that Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs was having a promotion where, when you sent in enough box tops, they'd send you a propeller beanie.

So Calvin bugs his mom and dad to eat his cereal, so he can get the boxtops faster (they don't). He finally sends his form and the boxtops away, thinking he'll get the beanie quickly, only to read the fine print and discover the usual 6-8 week wait ("I'll be old by then!"). When it comes, he breaks the propeller, and only his dad can fix it ("Hey, Mom! Dad fixed something!" "He did? Your father?").

And, having day-dreamed for weeks about how the propeller beanie will let him fly -- he finds out that all it does is spin (batteries not included). Whereupon he kicks it to the ground, and he and Hobbes play with the box.

A finer parable for the high tech industry I've yet to hear.

And, as an analysis of a personality trait of mine... it's one that cuts exceedingly to the bone.

So while, on the one hand, I want to point out this sparkly thing I'm doing with something I'm not at all familiar with... On the other hand, I want y'all to know what I mean in the future when I say, "Aw, it's just another propeller beanie."

Anyway...

I was looking for a name for the Mac for the network (everyone has to have a machine name), and I was looking at the name of varieties of apples, first. But akirlu, after protesting that I only wanted to use boring apple names, said, "You could always call it Stone Soup."

Ah. Right. Gotcha.

So I am.