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As you can see, I'm quite eclectic. This is what real horror fans have on their iPods not that "heavy metal" crap. :P
What's on yours?
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
January 1, 2013
What's on your iTunes, Dr Blood?
As you can see, I'm quite eclectic. This is what real horror fans have on their iPods not that "heavy metal" crap. :P
What's on yours?
May 23, 2012
Linux MintPPC on an Apple iBook M7698LL/A
With May being the 11th birthday of my ancient Apple iBook from 2001, I wondered if it was possible to get it running a lot faster with something other than the originally installed OSX Tiger 10.4.11 operating system.
I'd never tried the various Ubuntu PPC distributions which came out over the years as I'd heard bad things about them. People were always reporting that the battery didn't charge or suspend malfunctioned. As for using the AirPort card to connect to the internet, you might as well forget that you even have one.
But then I found out about MintPPC 9 and, for a number of reasons (including the fact that I can't leave well enough alone), I downloaded and installed it on my iBook.
The installation took just over an hour and I was quite surprised that I didn't even need to add the Xorg.conf update which the MintPPC website recommends. I did it anyway just to be on the safe side although everything looked and sounded right straight away.
Unfortunately, that's where my joy ended.
MintPPC, even though it uses the LXDE desktop environment, was painfully slow to the point of being unusable. I only have 320mb of RAM in my iBook but I doubt that another 256mb would make any difference. I have the original 500mhz PowerPC G3 "Icebook" with 64mb of 66mhz RAM soldered to the board (not the later 128mb version) so it's never going to reach the dizzy heights of 640mb with only one extra memory slot available anyway.
Since owning my iBook (which I got from eBay for $40), I've upgraded the hard drive to 40gb instead of the original 10gb one, changed the CD drive to a DVD drive, and replaced the cable to the LCD (which, infamously, was one of the causes for a lot of product returns and a class action lawsuit for Apple due to the design flaw which pinched the wires in the hinge and made the display fail to light up). I've had this iBook apart several times and it was the worst computer for upgrading that I've ever had the misfortune to work on. But that's another story.
All the things which I took for granted with Tiger were impossible to get working with MintPPC. I had no wireless connection, no DVD playback, and, although I got used to VLC player crashing when playing flv videos on Tiger, it was set as the default for mp3 playback on MintPPC which was absolutely stupid because it crashed with those too.
AbiWord opened slower than MS Word and the same with Gnumeric compared to Excel. Even if it had been available, I don't think I would have had the patience to wait for LibreOffice.
I then started to get random freezes and couldn't even log out or shutdown properly. After several reboots things settled down more but this was a couple of hours in and I'd had enough. I also really hated the cheap and nasty look of LXDE.
So, without further ado, I reinstalled Tiger. It took about an hour to install and probably four more to do all the software and security updates. Putting all the software back on and adding my iTunes library took the rest of the day.
After all this, some good came of it. Tiger now runs a lot faster than it did before. I've deleted a lot of junk (especially music which I was bored with), and I probably won't ever bother putting VLC player or MacTubes back on because neither worked properly anyway.
My Apple iBook is now almost 100% functional. I can play DVDs easily, listen to music with iTunes 8.2.1, and surf the internet with Safari 4 or Camino 2.1. I discovered that using the "mobile" versions of the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube websites made things even faster (although it's still impossible to play any YouTube videos which are converted to 3gp with my version of QuickTime).
If you are thinking of "upgrading" your iBook to MintPPC, don't! MintPPC is a nice idea and skillfully put together to get as far as it has, but unless you have a top of the range G4 iBook, it'll probably be useless to you.
I'd never tried the various Ubuntu PPC distributions which came out over the years as I'd heard bad things about them. People were always reporting that the battery didn't charge or suspend malfunctioned. As for using the AirPort card to connect to the internet, you might as well forget that you even have one.
But then I found out about MintPPC 9 and, for a number of reasons (including the fact that I can't leave well enough alone), I downloaded and installed it on my iBook.
The installation took just over an hour and I was quite surprised that I didn't even need to add the Xorg.conf update which the MintPPC website recommends. I did it anyway just to be on the safe side although everything looked and sounded right straight away.
Unfortunately, that's where my joy ended.
MintPPC, even though it uses the LXDE desktop environment, was painfully slow to the point of being unusable. I only have 320mb of RAM in my iBook but I doubt that another 256mb would make any difference. I have the original 500mhz PowerPC G3 "Icebook" with 64mb of 66mhz RAM soldered to the board (not the later 128mb version) so it's never going to reach the dizzy heights of 640mb with only one extra memory slot available anyway.
Since owning my iBook (which I got from eBay for $40), I've upgraded the hard drive to 40gb instead of the original 10gb one, changed the CD drive to a DVD drive, and replaced the cable to the LCD (which, infamously, was one of the causes for a lot of product returns and a class action lawsuit for Apple due to the design flaw which pinched the wires in the hinge and made the display fail to light up). I've had this iBook apart several times and it was the worst computer for upgrading that I've ever had the misfortune to work on. But that's another story.
All the things which I took for granted with Tiger were impossible to get working with MintPPC. I had no wireless connection, no DVD playback, and, although I got used to VLC player crashing when playing flv videos on Tiger, it was set as the default for mp3 playback on MintPPC which was absolutely stupid because it crashed with those too.
AbiWord opened slower than MS Word and the same with Gnumeric compared to Excel. Even if it had been available, I don't think I would have had the patience to wait for LibreOffice.
I then started to get random freezes and couldn't even log out or shutdown properly. After several reboots things settled down more but this was a couple of hours in and I'd had enough. I also really hated the cheap and nasty look of LXDE.
So, without further ado, I reinstalled Tiger. It took about an hour to install and probably four more to do all the software and security updates. Putting all the software back on and adding my iTunes library took the rest of the day.
After all this, some good came of it. Tiger now runs a lot faster than it did before. I've deleted a lot of junk (especially music which I was bored with), and I probably won't ever bother putting VLC player or MacTubes back on because neither worked properly anyway.
My Apple iBook is now almost 100% functional. I can play DVDs easily, listen to music with iTunes 8.2.1, and surf the internet with Safari 4 or Camino 2.1. I discovered that using the "mobile" versions of the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube websites made things even faster (although it's still impossible to play any YouTube videos which are converted to 3gp with my version of QuickTime).
If you are thinking of "upgrading" your iBook to MintPPC, don't! MintPPC is a nice idea and skillfully put together to get as far as it has, but unless you have a top of the range G4 iBook, it'll probably be useless to you.
March 28, 2012
So I didn't win an iPad again!
It comes as no surprise really that I entered yet another iPad giveaway and didn't win. I'm not even going to name the website which did it as they don't deserve any recognition of their existence.
I also didn't win a free Blu-ray in a giveaway hosted by a horror website. I don't care about that so much because not only was the movie completely crap, it wasn't really horror, and I don't even own a Blu-ray player to watch it on should I have been one of the unlucky ones.
All these things are fixed in favour of stooges anyway especially the "too good to be true" offers which you get spammed with on Twitter every time you mention an Apple product.
Now that I don't have Netflix anymore, I'm not even sure what I would do with an iPad. I'm pretty sure that it's nothing more than a toy computer and wouldn't actually be useful for anything but I still want one just to find out.
The trouble is that I don't want to spend over $500 on something which I predict will end up unused in a drawer within a few days of getting it.
To win one would be awesome because then I could fiddle with it, get bored, and either pass it on to somebody who doesn't have a real computer or trade it in somewhere for all the "After Dark Horrorfest" DVDs and a selection of little cakes.
To me, the Apple iPad is just a big, awkward iPhone. I've heard that it doesn't work with Flash (so that means no YouTube) and its storage capacity is so pitiful that even my humble Asus Eee PC netbook (now with EasyPeasy on it) is a more viable alternative.
But I still want to win one and keep on trying. It'll probably be the iPad's 10th generation before I ever come as close to getting one as I did with that "Fright Night" competition which left a really bad taste in my mouth and caused me to boycott the film in anger (not that I would have ever watched that crappy remake anyway). Yes, I will whinge about that until the day I die just so you know.
If you have an iPad which you don't want, even if it's one of the first ones and only has 16gb of RAM, I'm here ready for it should you want it to go to a good (or any) home. I promise to be bored with it within three days maximum and pass it on to someone else. I am also willing to accept an iPhone, iPod Touch (iTouch?), Kindle or Nook - all of which I have as much use for as a second pair of buttocks.
I also didn't win a free Blu-ray in a giveaway hosted by a horror website. I don't care about that so much because not only was the movie completely crap, it wasn't really horror, and I don't even own a Blu-ray player to watch it on should I have been one of the unlucky ones.
All these things are fixed in favour of stooges anyway especially the "too good to be true" offers which you get spammed with on Twitter every time you mention an Apple product.
Now that I don't have Netflix anymore, I'm not even sure what I would do with an iPad. I'm pretty sure that it's nothing more than a toy computer and wouldn't actually be useful for anything but I still want one just to find out.
The trouble is that I don't want to spend over $500 on something which I predict will end up unused in a drawer within a few days of getting it.
To win one would be awesome because then I could fiddle with it, get bored, and either pass it on to somebody who doesn't have a real computer or trade it in somewhere for all the "After Dark Horrorfest" DVDs and a selection of little cakes.
To me, the Apple iPad is just a big, awkward iPhone. I've heard that it doesn't work with Flash (so that means no YouTube) and its storage capacity is so pitiful that even my humble Asus Eee PC netbook (now with EasyPeasy on it) is a more viable alternative.
But I still want to win one and keep on trying. It'll probably be the iPad's 10th generation before I ever come as close to getting one as I did with that "Fright Night" competition which left a really bad taste in my mouth and caused me to boycott the film in anger (not that I would have ever watched that crappy remake anyway). Yes, I will whinge about that until the day I die just so you know.
If you have an iPad which you don't want, even if it's one of the first ones and only has 16gb of RAM, I'm here ready for it should you want it to go to a good (or any) home. I promise to be bored with it within three days maximum and pass it on to someone else. I am also willing to accept an iPhone, iPod Touch (iTouch?), Kindle or Nook - all of which I have as much use for as a second pair of buttocks.
March 4, 2011
Apple iPad 2 and Netflix
Although I'm probably never going to buy either an iPad or the new iPad 2, I saw this video on YouTube and started thinking about the possibilities of watching horror movies on the thing.
I have no experience with Apple products other than an old G3 iBook which I bought from ebay and turned into a glorified DVD player so I don't know if the iPad is even capable of playing Netflix streaming movies or if you have to download everything through iTunes. It would probably be the greatest invention ever made for me if it could replace the Acer TravelMate that I currently use for Netflix.
Anyway, I just thought I'd share the news about this product. I went to bed as soon as I got home from work and didn't watch any films at all today. According to my Netflix queue, the next horror DVD which I will be watching is "The Children" (2008).
I've only got 11 films in my Netflix queue at the moment:
The Children
A Perfect Getaway
Open Your Eyes
In the Womb: Cats and Dogs
The Kiss
Doghouse
Fish Tank
The Apartment
Thesis
Mesrine: Part 1: Killer Instinct
Vengeance
I'm running out of new stuff to watch. Any suggestions?
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