Zebra Finches are nesting

While dropping a car off in Karratha, I saw a dozen or so Zebra Finches building nests. They were building their nests in the hollows created by old fronds in a row of palm trees. It was a hub of activity, birds flying backward and forward every 60 seconds or so carrying twigs twice their length. I wish I had my camera with me as they were not at all concerned about my presence.

Fun and games with Power Macintosh G3s

After spending some time trying to configure the Beige G3 Server mentioned in my previous post, I gave up and started working on one of my B&W G3s (see here and here for specifications). I suspect my Beige G3 Server has IDE bus issues as I could not get it to reliably boot from the CD-ROM drive (I tried a few different working drives). It is a bit sad that this machine doesn't work as it is a very nice machine otherwise.

My B&W G3 is a 35oMHz model with a USB 2.0 PCI card and SCSI PCI card fitted. It is running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and I have replaced the stock 6GB IDE HDD with a 40GB IDE HDD. RAM is currently at 512MB (2 x 256MB chips, 2 spare slots) although I may increase this to 1GB (the specified maximum). It is currently configured as a VNC and FTP server (as described in my previous post) and will eventually run headless with an external 250GB USB 2.0 drive for storage.

Newton 2100 on the web!

I managed to connect my Newton 2100 to the Internet yesterday (using a 3Com 3C589D Ethernet card). Copied the network settings from my laptop into the setup on the Newton, connected the Ethernet and fired up Courier. It all works quite well (actually much better than I expected). The next step is to try Email and perhaps some RSS news feeds...

Tonight I will attempt to setup my 300MHz G3 Server with Mac OS X 10.2, a PCI USB 2.0 card and a 250GB external USB drive. Unsure of how much RAM I will add to it however I will be upgrading the 10Base-T on-board Ethernet with an Apple 10/100Base-T PCI card. The plan is to use this machine as an FTP server for backups of photos/files/music. Once it is set up I will use VNC to manage it (Vine Server for the server and Chicken of the VNC for the client).

RetroChallenge Step #4 (final)

The RetroChallenge has finished. Check out retrochallenge.net for the results. Due to work commitments (and spending a fair amount of time away from my retro-collection) my involvement was negligible. Thanks to dale and the crew for putting this on. I may have to arrange annual leave for the next one...