ADAPT OR DIE

 I like technology but I hate to see perfectly-useable wares get discarded.  Like when Apple dropped most ports on its laptops, users are left with only a few USB ports and some USB-C ports.  Or when laptops in general no longer have VGA or other legacy ports, it's HDMI or use some dock.  As a result, in my computer hardware collection I have various adapters.  USB-to-Ethernet, SCSI1-to-SCSI2, USBC-to-USB3, DVI-to-miniDP, so on and so on.  Yes, I still use a Mac computer and once used an Amiga computer, maybe weekly, which explains the SCSI connection.

My current computer is a Lenovo Flex 5 laptop.  When I got it some years ago, it was running Windows 10.  Recently, I finally gave in to Microsoft's push and upgraded to Windows 11.  The laptop has a touch screen and something with a recent Windows update seems to cause the screen flicker every now and then.  If I use an external monitor, there is no flickering.  I have a few external monitors that worked with the laptop before, nothing fancy, as a matter of fact they are somewhat defective, in a minor way, free stuff from my local Buy Nothing group.  Strangely, now none of the monitors work with the laptop.  I used the built-in HDMI port, tried a dock with DP port and HDMI port, nothing worked.  Last-ditch effort, I used an adapter to convert the outgoing HDMI signal to VGA and it worked!  It would be nice if I can go directly from HDMI to HDMI, so I can listen to music on the monitor's built-in speaker, but at least with the adapter I can use an external monitor again.  Adapt or die!  Ok, it's not that serious, I just like to say that.

GOOD OL' WALL STREET POWERBOOK G3

In recent days, I played around with some old computers I have in my attic and elsewhere.  Today I spent some time with my first Mac computer, a Macintosh Powerbook G3, aka Wall Street.  I re-learned so many things I need to write this down somewhere easily accessible, maybe the general public can find some useful info, too.

I got the old Powerbook with Mac OS 9.x and now it runs some early version of OS X.  I found the preference setting to reboot into OS 9 but then it seems to be stuck when I tried to locate the equivalent option to reboot into OS X.  Second time around booting into OS 9 I gave Startup Disk some extra time to crunch the hard drive to present the OS X boot folder.  Whew!  Not that I plan to do anything useful with it.

How did we get by back in those dark days!?  A laptop with no WiFi?!  No freedom of movement, just tied to whatever desk that has an Ethernet cord connected to the router!  The optical drive was just a CD-R, I thought it was DVD!  No wonder there was no DVD Player application in the computer.  Still, when I inserted a regular music CD nothing happened.  No icon for the disc, iTunes didn't see it as a source.  Maybe back then OS X or 9 didn't support importing of music?  Who knows, but I am not going to sweat it, for now.

It was my first Mac and I spent much time and energy to expand it. I think it came with a removable battery and a removable optical drive.  A little knob at the front left and right corners is used to eject the whole unit.  On the left bay I added a SuperDisk removable drive from VST Technologies, with capacity of 120 MB!  The battle between Iomega Zip and Bernoulli whatever-its-name was still going on and the max capacity at the time was 100 MB.  So VST outdid those guys by 20 MB, except that it never caught on.  I have just one of those 120 MB disk.  The drive is capable of reading 3.5" floppy disks, woohoo!  I just test wrote a file to some random floppy that I still have.  I have this crazy idea that someday someone important will offer me a huge sum of money to get something off a floppy disk.  With this laptop, I can read the disk but then what?  It has a PCMCIA slot and I have a PC-card adapter to add two high-speed USB 2.0 ports, alas when I connected a 128 MB flash to it nothing happened.  (I was mindful to not use some flash drive with capacity of GBs in case the old OS doesn't recognize such high capacity.)  Maybe I would need additional driver.  Maybe the USB ports are for mice and such only.  I suppose worst-case scenario I can connect the laptop to an Ethernet network and transfer files via the network.

What a trip down memory lane!