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Macintosh Plus Emulation
First published July 2003. Updated July 2012, and March 2023. I’ll never forget being intrigued by the first Mac I ever saw. I spent my childhood tinkering with Commodore 64’s, Amstrad CPC 464’s and the occasional Amiga. I first had regular access to IBM compatibles in 1986 and they consumed my attention for the next two…
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PowerBook G3 PDQ SSD Upgrade
As I previously boasted, I am the proud owner of a PowerBook G3 Series laptop (v2, “PDQ”, released September 1998). Since I wrote that article, I have repaired the hinges and maxed out the RAM to 512 MB. I had upgraded the hard drive several times from the original 2 GB drive. Each drive upgrade dramatically decreased load-times and noise. I did…
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Driving.js and the Gaming Loop
The Diving Game is a JavaScript game (desktop only) that myself and my Year 9 class wrote in August of 2016. I was asked to teach ActionScript and Flash in the context of gaming. But by 2016 the demise of Flash, if not imminent, was obviously near, so I decided that JavaScript would better serve…
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Mac mini Mock Monitor
I have an old Mac mini that I wanted to use to run a research experiment. Its whole purpose would be to run five versions of the same program millions of times over. I didn’t need a monitor to watch such command-line action, instead I wanted to monitor the experiment remotely using the excellent program screen. Using…
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Clone Using Windows Complete PC Backup
Recently the hard drive on which I had Vista installed began to behave erratically. But I wasn’t worried as I had been using Vista’s “Complete PC Backup”! What could possibly go wrong? However, try as I might, and I tried a lot, I wasn’t able to get the recovery to work. It always gave the…
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PC Coil Whine
Last month I converted my P4 desktop into a home-theatre PC. Using a soft paint brush I dusted down the old innards till they looked like new, and mounted them into a new case. After powering it up, I was upset to hear a screaming sound coming from my otherwise quiet PC. This would not…
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PowerBook G3 PDQ runs without its screen and mic
I am the proud owner of a PowerBook G3 Series laptop (v2, “PDQ”, released September 1998). The “Wallstreet”, as it is known, was an incredible computer in its day. It was one of the first laptops to have everything you could want in a desktop: a 14.1″ active matrix XGA screen (which was bigger than the 15″ desktop…
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SETI@home: Linux vs Windows – 3.03 vs 3.08
Abstract What follows are the results from an experiment I conducted over several days during April of 2004 to determine which of four SETI@home clients was the fastest at processing work-units. The results should be considered as weak due to the large number of variables, the small sample taken and the limited scope of the…
