With all the stupid going on with the election, I have had a few tech updates. First off, I picked up an iMac G3 450 DV, Ruby, for less than 10 dollars at a thrift store. Apparently, it was used in a kindergarten in Morton Grove. I always loved the look of the old iMacs, but never wanted to spend over $1,000 on a piece of electronics that goes out of date in 18 months.
Cleaned it up, replaced the 64mb of RAM with 1Gig, then replaced the 20G 5400 RPM hard drive with a 40G, 7200 RPM drive. With the bus speeds, I am not going to bother to try to fine a PATA/IDE solid state drive.
I also installed Mac OS 10.3 and Lubuntu 16.04 on there. Lubuntu runs just fine, and I can use the latest software on there. It now proudly inhabits my workshop and is a good music player, a way to take notes, and lightly surf the web for projects I am working on. If I really need power, I just SSH to my desktop machine upstairs and use the iMac as a graphical terminal. I was going to try to use the Mac OS (9.4 or 10.3) but they have been abandoned a long time ago, and I need a modern web browser.
In other Mac news, picked up the beautiful Logitech K750-mac solar powered keyboard. All of the Mac mappings work just fun under Linux. It is about the nicest keyboards I have ever used. Super thin and high quality and it charges with room lighting. I actually don’t mind the Mac layout, a much better use for the function keys, now they are volume control, program launchers, etc.
