Recently I had the pleasure of taking apart a tangerine iBook G3 clamshell. The symptom was the question mark on the folder icon at power-on. The CD-ROM drive reportedly hasn't worked for almost two years so I was unable to boot from any sort of repair or diagnosis disc. The computer is also sans-firewire so no target disc mode. After trying to usual suspects (zapping the PRAM, resetting the power manager) I resorted to taking apart the machine.

The first task was to replace the CD-ROM drive with another one. This didn't work. Either my replacement drive was bad or the motherboard has some other issues with the IDE controller. So I move on to extracting the hard drive and connected it to a firewire bridge. Disk Warrior didn't report too many obvious things so I let it rebuild the disc. I think the problem was that it just needed to be blessed.

Anyway, I recorded a time lapse of all this fun. Just under three hours in all. Enjoy!

Link to the video.
Link to the wonderful take-apart guide I used from ifixit.com.

The guys at the iPodLinux Project are one step closer to making your old iPod not feel so left out. You can now install a video player that will play specially crafted .AVI's, even on grayscale screens. There are some audio sync issues so it's not quite ready for prime time. But fun none-the-less.

Link.

Apple has begun to pull the built-in modem from the Mac line up. First models to get the treatment are the new iMac G5 and the Mini (but only the higher end models). To make up for the shortcoming, Apple has created the Apple USB Modem, pictured left, for $49. A little steep if you ask me, for a modem. But in typical Apple fashion, it's smaller than any external modem I've seen. And it supports caller-id which has me thinking it might be a great replacement for my large external serial modems I use for ncidd (network caller id daemon) and ncidpop.

This is certainly a trend that will continue until none of the machines they sell offer internal modems, not unlike the original CRT iMac that didn't come with a floppy. People will whine and complain for a while and they'll forget about it. They always do.

Link.

I'm not the type to kick people when they're “down” but I couldn't resist this. I'll let the picture do the talking. For those who don't know, tuaw.com is “The Unofficial Apple Weblog.”

Link.

Update: Yes, it's probaby not fair since they are part of Weblogs, Inc. which is owned by AOL and who knows what goes on there these days.

Windows and Linux users have had this for a while now and finally there's a Sourceforge project for the Mac called gDisk. It's not 100% perfect in that it doesn't actually mount as disk in the Finder– rather it's an application. But nonetheless, it works as advertised. Last check, Gmail space is at 2657 MB.

Link.