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Scored this book today. Initially passed on it, figuring that it'd be too Sun Microsystems-specific for me, but it turns out to be more of a snapshot of Silicon Valley life in the early 1980s. Cover is decorated with epoxy-encapsulated AMD AM8052 cathode ray tube (!) controller, surrounded by a...

My 5125 Portable had been working great since I recapped it back in 2008. Then I started to get "This (floppy) disk is unreadable. Eject | Initialize" error messages. Now it happens regardless of whether I have a disk in the drive or not. And if I do insert a floppy and attempt to initialize it...

My first new/old Mac in years! Ended up paying too much ($55) but it was local, and has the rear door (though on second glance, the latch seems to be missing--oh well!). Current plan is to SSD it and use it as a replacement for the Mac Portable which I will finally be listing on That Auction...

Scored a working iMac G5 from my employer, but need to recap the power supply and motherboard before I dare to use it much. Got several others which aren't powering up at all, but don't know if recapping + new fuse would fix or not. All have bulging/leaking electrolytic capacitors on the...

Unrestored Classic II motherboard with leaky capacitors: Getting ready to solder new capacitors (applying solder paste with a syringe). I made a mess of the foil trace for the + side of C3, and you might just barely be able to see that I've already mended it by soldering a tiny bit of wire in...

I don't know if they were just using crap parts at the time, but so far, ever Portable and every Classic II that I've encountered has had capacitor issues, and it's always those surface mount electrolytics. I recapped my Portable some time ago, and plan on going over the two Classic II...

Alright, this conquest actually belongs to a friend of mine, but I thought it was a hoot: The Nikon SP was last manufactured in either the late 1950s or early 1960s, and it's highly collectable, particularly in black. A few years ago, Nikon unearthed the original tooling for the camera and...

Fellow MLAer antoine64 sent me this Classic II in trade for a Cube power supply, and the plastics are just about perfect! Only tiny and faint marks on it, the rubber feet are all there. Sort of yellowed, but probably nothing that peroxide + oxy bleach won't lift right off.

I sort of went crazy over these things last week, but I'm all better now [:D] ]'> I am amazed at how much technology one gets for the hobby dollar these days. All carbon fiber, super mini gyroscopes, micro motors, lithium polymer batteries and newfangled 2.4 ghz digital radio. The white and...

Okay, not mine, but I got to play with 'em [:D] ]'> The other day, a couple of HP boxes arrived at the office. Boxes seemed awfully big and heavy for 24" LCD monitors, and in fact, one of the handholds on the box tears, and I drop the thing! Get it into the server room and am recording the...

Found it on eBay with a $5 starting bid price and eventually got it for a bit under $12 + shipping:

Swans S3W speakers with matching amplifier (it's the tiny aluminum cylinder which serves as a volume control too) http://idisk.mac.com/fourseason7444-Public/swans_s3w-1.jpg http://idisk.mac.com/fourseason7444-Public/swans_s3w-2.jpg Just set them up an hour ago, but so far, I am absolutely...

Just scored one of these on eBay, for about 1/2 of the price listed on the website: http://teconaudio.com/model_55.html I've wanted an itty bitty stereo tube amplifier for some time, and I can't homebrew a chassis as nice as this one. I may use it as the computer sound system, or even as basis...

Just got it on Friday after a 3-week wait, and I spent a good part of Friday and Saturday figuring out how to install Kubuntu on it. Mine's the $499 model that's second from the bottom of the line, with a 1.2 ghz Via C7 processor, 120 gb hard drive and (originally) SuSE Enterprise 10. Totally...

Look at what I just installed into the rack at work: Inside revealed: http://idisk.mac.com/fourseason7444-Public/xserve-int.jpg Installed but not yet powered up at the bottom of the stack: http://idisk.mac.com/fourseason7444-Public/xserve-ext.jpg From top to bottom: Rose UltraMatrix KVM...

Slow week at the office, so what better time to continue cleaning and prepping older company machines for new homes? There's something satisfying about clearing away grime, pen marks, stickers and other junk away and revealing a surprisingly nice looking machine beneath. Man, I don't remember...

Anyone experience this? No signs of life whatsoever: No fans spin up, no relay clicking, no noises, no nothing. Nothing obviously blown on the motherboard, no bad smells of burnt electronics. Tried a new battery but that made no diff. Wondering if a fuse in the power supply has failed, but it...

http://gallery.mac.com/fourseason7444/100016 After much procrastination, I finally got around to replacing all of the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard, and that seems to have solved all problems--crackling audio, sudden shutdowns, etc. Where possible, I replaced surface-mount types...

Wow, Office Depot has really cut the prices on some of their notebooks, and in particular, the models with the now-defunct HD DVD format drives. And so, here's what I got (demo unit) HP dv9650us: 17" Brightview screen Intel Core 2 Duo processor HD DVD drive HDMI output dual 160 GB SATA hard...

The backlight in my 12" iBook G4 was getting kind of dim, so I purchased a replacement from these folks: http://www.ccfldirect.com The tubes arrived well-packed a few days later. Really thin and frail-looking! And getting access to the original part was also an adventure: You have to dig into...