iBook G3 Clamshell Repair Timelapse

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 Banner Images, Explained

I know a lot of you look at the blog to see if there are any new banner images that have been added to page and will reload it over and over to see what comes up next. I admit it, I do it myself sometimes– it's fun.

To that end, I've added a page with all of the images with a short description of who/what/where. The link is on the right, The Banner Images.

Enjoy.

Vintage Atomic Era Print Ads

Plan59.com has a schweet collection of good condition print advertisements from the 1950's. One gallery in particular is called “Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine.” Pictured left, bread is fresher in Cellophane. I'm not sure that I've been been quite that excitted over a slice of bread and jam, but what ever floats your boat.

Link. Thanks, Al!

SpokePOV: POV for your bike

I really like POV because of the way it tricks your brain into seeing images. I had a toy when I was younger that looked a lot like a flat “bat” that had a small keyboard on it. I typed in messages and then would wave it back and forth and it would “print” the message with red LEDs.

That toy is long gone– here to replace it is this is a kit that you can purcahse and assemble to give the wheels of your bike POV images. Bonus points for the Pac Man reference!

Link. Thanks, Micah!