Category Archives: Computers

Formatting drives in 2.5 inch external enclosures

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I have a somewhat generic BlueEye O2 USB2.0/FW400 2.5″ external drive enclosure. I was recently trying to format some older laptop drives (2.5″ PATA) and discovered that the “erase” and “partition” options in Disk Utility (Mac OS X 10.5.5 version) always fail when I was connecting using USB but work fine when connecting using FireWire. The error message is along the lines of I/O error or something. I’m sure glad my MacBook has FireWire…

I wonder whether this is a limitation of the BlueEye chipset or the Disk Utility software. I really should upgrade 10.5.5 to 10.5.8 too…

A rather rambling update

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It has been a while since I have posted here – so here goes:

  • Added a few new birds to my life list – most notably a pair of Bush Stone-curlews (Burhinus grallarius) seen on the road to East Intercourse Island in Dampier in the middle of the night (I was on night shift, not going for a midnight twitch);
  • Work on my British N Gauge model railway is progressing well (tunnels are under construction, some buildings have been added). The locomotive and rolling stock collection is growing also (I have three Graham Farish locomotives: a Class 08, a Class 31 and a Class 37);
  • I seem to be continually adding Macs (in particular iMacs) to the collection – thanks Alex! Thankfully I have a shed…
Edit: Changed Beach Stone-curlew to Bush Stone-curlew after consultation with experts.

Hot rod 7500

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I have finally finished building (I think) my hot rod Power Mac 7500.  It has:

  • 256MB of RAM (using 4 of the 8 slots in case I find some more 64MB sticks);
  • An IBM 18GB SCSI disk;
  • A PowerLogix PowerForce G3 350/175/512K G3 (Spartan) upgrade card running at 300MHz;
  • A fairly generic USB 1.1 PCI card;
  • An Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T PCI card;
  • An iXMicro Ultimate Rez Twin Turbo 128 PCI graphics card;
  • An AppleVision 1710 Display.
Everything else (floppy and CD drive) is stock.  It runs Mac OS 8.6 like lightning.

Playing Chess

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I have started to play chess again (for the first time in many years). I am not very good at it but I am keen to learn and find it intellectually stimulating. At the moment I am playing against the computer but I may play against real people (online) at some point. I purchased some basic chess books as my Christmas present and am slowly working my way through them.

For some reason I have always been intrigued by the game. Grandad and Grandma Howell gave us a really nice wooden set when we were younger (I have it in the shed) and Chris and I would sometimes play games. From memory he would usually beat me…

At the moment I am just playing the version of Chess that ships with Mac OS X. I have installed Deep Green (by Joachim Bondo) on the Newton 2100. I will be having a look at Glaurung as well.

Mission Accomplished

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I have finally finished re-building my PowerBook G4 12″ (1GHz). I have upgraded the hard drive (40GB to 160GB), replaced the broken combo drive (got one cheap off eBay) and upgraded the operating system (10.4 to 10.5).

To others considering a similar mission:
  • The hard drive is much easier to replace than the optical drive;
  • The 160GB 5400 RPM Western Digital Scorpio disk runs warmer than the stock disk (to be expected really *);
  • Remember where all the screws came from (I didn’t);
  • Use the right tools for the job;
  • There are a few service manuals available on the web. Use them.
I can’t really justify a new laptop at the moment. I think these upgrades have extended the life of my old one a bit longer.

* Edit: this may be due to the fact that the original disk was 4200 RPM.