and then there was one...

My Thinkpad died last week. The CMOS battery was flat and when I replaced it something must have been unhappy on the motherboard as the machine would no longer start up (well, it would start, then stop on the way into Windows). Thank goodness for external hard-drive enclosures - I was able to retrieve all that I needed from the Thinkpad's disk, although much of it was backed-up already.
So...it's just me and the Powerbook now. It's a fine machine, now that I've upped the memory and increased the hard-drive capacity. I'll look around for an old PC in a month or so, though, as I need one to run Driveware for sound system setting up (and for Solitaire). It also seems essential (especially as I seem to insist on using second-hand hardware) to have two computers at one's disposal, so that if one goes down you can get online with the other one to seek help.

upgrades...

The Pismo G3 now has a bigger hard drive. I picked up a 60GB Fujitsu MHV2060AH, after many hours comparing brands and specs and trying to ensure that it would work. My Windows experience of drive cloning wasn't good, and I wasn't looking forward to reloading everything manually onto the new disk. However, my internet travels came by a good little application called Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a `donation-shareware' program that does a full disk clone onto a new one. I installed the new drive into a USB enclosure, connected it up to the Pismo (via USB 1.1 UGH!), formatted and partitioned the drive with Disk Utility, started CCC and left it to it for the evening. All seemed to transfer ok, so I removed the new drive from the enclosure, swapped it with the original 20GB one in the computer, turned on...and...it all worked! There was my computer, just as before, all files in place, except that now the hard drive icon was revised to represent the [two] partitions of the newly formatted 60GB disk.

For those wanting to upgrade their Mac's hard-drive via the `cloning' process, I can recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, and there is a facility to make a donation to the company. I would suggest that a Firewire or USB 2.0 drive would be much quicker way to make the transfer, though. I do lament the fact that, despite Firewire's real-world speed advantage over USB 2.0, Firewire products are still more expensive and harder to find than USB 2.0. Must be part of another Windows conspiracy...

Weekend rogaining

I went on the M.A.D. 12 hour rogaine on Saturday. It was my first rogaine, and for the uninitiated rogaining is like orienteering except that the duration is longer, you participate as a team and you don't have to reach all the checkpoints. This event was held up in the Mt Disappointment area, about an hour north of Melbourne. Such a nice day, and pleasant forest country to ramble through. And...it seemed that all the closet Polarfleece wearers were out in force, too, which made for a good atmosphere.
We just stayed out for 6 hours (12pm - 6pm) and racked up some good points from a few hard-to-find checkpoints.

another Shure thing

The Shure E4c earphones I'd ordered from Ebay arrived today. They are very sensitive and certainly show up the soundcard on my computer, and the internal noise on my discman seems more obvious, too, but the sound of the phones is excellent. Looking forward to using them on the plane.