posts tagged with the keyword ‘powerbook’

2011.12.15

Mac-Cat-Attack!

RepRap Cat

I’ve already talked about the Top 5 Places Kitten was, but since kitten (who is now a cat, and sometimes referred to as RepRap Cat) spends a lot of time in the office with me, I thought it was time for a new list…

The top 4 Macs kitten has sat upon:

  1. MacBook Pro
  2. Mac mini
  3. G4 PowerBook
  4. Mac Pro

She also spends a lot of time on the printer, which isn’t a Mac, but has a lot of buttons to press.

The only Mac missing is the iMac, and that’s because she hasn’t figured out how to sit on top of that one… yet.

Update: I snapped this picture less than two hours after posting this.

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2011.01.20

Time Lapse Bot 3

Time Lapse Bot 3

I built the original “Time Lapse Bot” in September 2009 before BarCampMilwaukee4 happened. I managed to get an old office chair that someone was throwing away and thought I could put it to good use to move around the iMac and camera rig I had attached to it. You can see the original Time Lapse Bot post for more info.

The main issue with the original Time Lapse Bot was that if you unplugged it, you had to boot it up again, set the clock, and then restart the image capture. We thought about a UPS to give it a bit of “unplugged” time, but never added one.

Next up was Time Lapse Bot 2 which used an old clamshell iBook in place of the old iMac. This made everything much lighter but because the battery couldn’t hold a charge we still suffered the inability to unplug it and move it while it was running. (We typically solved this problem with really long extension cords.)

Time Lapse Bot 3

Time Lapse Bot 3 is the next step in Time Lapse Bot technology. We’ve taken an old PowerBook G4 (donated by Matt Gauger) which has a good battery in it, and paired it with a Canon ZR800 MiniDV camera, which also has a good battery. The result is a unit that can run on battery (at least for a few hours) and starts charging the batteries as soon as you plug in the AC power cord.

The entire unit is housed in a custom case which allows for easy transport. By “custom case” we’re referring to the plywood box that I constructed and painted black. That’s what we consider the pinnacle of “custom cases” around here.

The software that runs Time Lapse Bot is EvoCam by Evological. It’s $30 and well worth it. It’s feature packed, and rock solid. If you’re putting together a Mac-based time lapse rig that uses a video camera, or a web cam, or whatever, I highly recommend it.

Here’s a few of the time lapse videos we’ve made with the help of Time Lapse Bot.

We’ve finally reached a point where we are fairly pleased with Time Lapse Bot and it’s performance, so this is obviously not the time to sit still and relax. We’re currently working on a few upgrades to Time Lapse Bot, and hope 2011 brings even more Time Lapse Bot goodness to all the folks who enjoy time lapse videos…

(Thanks for reading this. If you’re reading it on Facebook or Google Reader or somewhere else it got syndicated to, consider visiting the original post, especially if you’d like to leave a comment.)

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2007.10.08

Computing Like it’s 2002!

Since the iBook died (R.I.P. and if you are keeping track, that’s 2 Macs that have died so far in 2007) it was time to revive the old Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet) and get computing!

The last time I even mentioned it was 2004 when the power adapter needed repair. After that I had a G3 iBook from work to use, until I didn’t, then I just stuck the old Wallstreet in the office to be forgotten, except when I stole RAM from it last year.

Well, it’s back folks! I am now using a Powerbook G3 running Mac OS X 10.1.5, and I’m trying to get apps on it. So far I have Firefox 1.0.7, and jEdit 4.1something on it, and am trying to find a version of Adium or Fire that will run on it. I think I’m stuck with Terminal.app over iTerm too… Sheesh, talk about the dark ages! I don’t even want to think about Thunderbird.

Wifi? Well, sort of… thanks to wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net and an old wifi card I had laying around. One problem, the card does not work with WEP, so while I can use it in my own house (by turning off WEP and restricting to MAC addresses) using it out and about is pretty much impossible without an ethernet cable. I also tried a USB PC card and a USB wifi adapter, but that didn’t work. I’d actually consider getting a wifi card that would work with WEP (and Mac OS X 10.1.5) if I could find one for cheap enough.

Anyway, I am mobile again… if you consider “mobile” sitting on the couch browsing the web very slowly.



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2004.06.02

Back to Debian

My time with Mandrake was short, and I’m now back to Debian on the old beige G3, and this time X11 worked! We’re now looking at KDE!

It’s all so very exciting. All I need now is the time to actually use the damn thing.

I’ve come to learn that the old saying “Linux is only free if you’re time has no value” is not exactly true, but can be somewhat close. I wasted a lot of time download disk images, and burning them, and not having them always work. Some of that is my own fault, as I didn’t always check the md5sum, but I can see the value in purchasing ready-to-run CD‘s that actually work. I can’t imagine doing a Linux install without a working computer sitting nearby with access to the net and all it’s resources. In some cases it took 8 or more hours to download disk images, which is still probably faster that waiting for shipping, but could be longer than going to a store to buy them. (Insert something about BitTorrent here…)

I’m not through with Debian, I still have an old PowerBook with Debian installed, but X11 not working. I’d like to see what can be done there, and I really need to look into running Linux from a CD using a USB thumbdrive as a /home…

Ah, the challenges of Linux never end…

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2004.04.02

Lynx on deb is OK

I’ve been attempting to load Debian onto an old PowerBook, and success is a ladder with many steps, and by that I mean that I ‘sort of’ got things working. I mean, I can log in, access the net, and all that stuff, I just can’t use a GUI. Yes, no X11 for me yet… So, I browsed the web for almost an hour last night using Lynx, and you know what? It worked pretty well. Most of the sites I read were weblog-type sites, so chances are they adhere to accessbility standards more than your average site, but I had no real problems reading what I wanted to read.

In fact, I probably got more reading done faster since I wasn’t distracted by images, or scroll bars, or browser chrome, or a mouse.

Hmmm, maybe I should think twice before installing X11…

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