It's 5am right now; usually if I'm writing this soon after waking up (it's
been like an hour and a half, but still), I'm writing in my morning pages
(Julia Cameron's prescribed method of journaling from The Artist's Way), so it
had me hesitating at the terminal even though I had an idea of what I wanted
to write about before I started lol.
First, a life update! Still no job, which hasn't been the most terrible thing
(I'd love to be a millionaire and never have to return to work again), but
paying the bills and such has been rough. Still, I am where I am and have been
able to keep going, so I'm grateful for that. I've been wanting to move to be
in person with a very close friend of mine, so I've been applying for jobs
where he is and also applying for remote jobs, but there've been no bites. My
old job is available again since one of my old coworkers left, but I've been
avoiding thinking too much about that one for my own wellbeing and two for the
fact that I don't want to be part of the idea that "the bad ones always come
back" lol. I've been up in my head about trying to write a longer narrative of
some sort -- in comic form or in prose form -- whether or not it'd become
anything financial -- but I feel frozen when I think about it. Like there's an
intense amount of pressure in me and the very thought of creating something
just to broadcast it gives me pause. Writing journal entries like this is
easy; I don't put the same pressures on myself to get it "right" -- just good
enough and hope if it fell flat then it also falls into obscurity. Not that it
isn't already a bit obscure, being on Gopher lol.
Anyway, with all that out of the way, I'm ready for the topic I wanted to talk
about to begin with -- my iMac G4! I've got a 15" iMac G4 with a 1GHz PowerPC
G4 running it, and I am using it to write this very post! I grabbed it from my
mom's house recently while I was over getting some of my stuff, and once I got
it home I ended up putting it on my drawing desk in my room and started
playing around with it again. I got it at some point back around the end of
high school -- off eBay I think, but honestly I have no recollection of where
exactly it came from -- and had it sitting here at my Pawpaw's house hosting a
small personal web server for my Polymer Science stuff. At some point or
another during college I ended up putting it over at my mother's house where
it had pretty much just been sitting unused but for a time or two ever since.
It's not a machine that's particularly good for modern tasks (read: web
browsing), but it definitely works for writing, listening to music, and SSHing
(with modern OpenSSH). I even managed to get it to play back 576/768p video
encoded and broadcasted from my main PC via VLC, which felt really awesome on
this lol.
It's all around a gorgeous machine, but it wasn't without its issues! The DVD
drive that originally came with it was finicky about actually opening, only
opening maybe 1/8 of the times you pressed the eject button, and this ended up
turning into 0 of the times when I brought it back home recently. It also only
had 768 MB of RAM, which to be fair is enough to run Tiger, but it definitely
felt limited especially with Classic running in the background. So, I pulled
about five different old computers apart to find a 1GB stick of PC2700 RAM and
an IDE DVD burner. Two, IDE DVD burners in fact, because the first one I put
in didn't work and I spent several hours trying to compile a firmware flasher
because I'd hoped maybe it just needed new firmware, but nope after pulling it
out and trying it with my desktop PC with an adapter, it just straight up
didn't work. Tried another of the exact same model and it had no issues with
the PC, so I put it in the iMac and it thankfully worked fine. So hooray! An
iMac G4 now with a working DVD drive AND 1.5GB of RAM (which felt WAY faster).
But, of course, a twenty year old computer just wouldn't be a twenty year old
if it didn't throw a fit over its age at some point, and pretty soon after I'd
upgraded everything, the hard disk started making a distinctive clicking as
everything on the system grinded to a halt. Ugh.
Just in case it turned out I'd actually just corrupted a system file or
something, I booted into a Tiger install DVD and ran disk utility to verify
and repair the disk. It gave me some kind of outlandish error while verifying
and refused to repair it, so I followed advice from some old forums and booted
into Disk Warrior 4 and attempted to use it to do the same thing. It ran for
a bit before screaming that there was definitely a hardware failure, and that
it would not attempt to repair the disk but instead would show me what was
corrupted, which wasn't but a few non-essential files. I didn't know what to
make of this other than "I have to replace the hard disk now, but I might can
recover the data hopefully." So, after more of the internet's advice, I went
on Amazon and ordered a 512GB Kingston SSD and an IDE<->SATA adapter. I also
ended up ordering another stick of RAM while I was at it for the bottom slot,
which is a SODIMM slot.
The disk stuff got here on Friday, but I was too tired to work on the iMac
that day, so I put it off till the next morning, where I had the iMac
disassembled on the floor for the third time now. I didn't order a 2.5-3.5"
disk bracket and I couldn't find my mounting tape to just stick the SSD to the
top of the DVD drive, so I ended up making a bracket out of a piece of
thin but sturdy enough cardboard. I got everything assembled and the drive
back into the machine before my mother text me and asked me if I wanted to go
to my niece's yard sale that she was having to raise money for a school trip.
Of course I said yes to that lol and we ended up going to that and a couple
other yard sales and a mostly emptied estate sale. As SOON as we got back,
USPS dropped off my RAM stick, so the timing actually worked out perfectly. I
put the iMac all back together, SSD, RAM, and all, and lo and behold! It was
working! I was ecstatic! I got Mac OS X Tiger installed, updated, and modified
for performance (thanks to Shuriken), and it was running great! At the same
time I'd also been running ddrescue on the original IDE drive, and on it there
were only a handful of sectors that couldn't be read, so pretty much all of
the data had been saved from it too! The extra RAM didn't show up in the
system profiler, which made me worry at first, but reseating it did the trick
and now it's fully maxed out at 2GB of PC2700 (DDR1) RAM. Hooray! It was
working great, and running about as fast as it possibly could. Oh, and I also
replaced the thermal paste on the CPU, whatever the other chip with a heatsink
is, and the thermal connection points connecting the CPU's heatsink with the
metal of the upper housing.
Besides all of that, I ended up adding a USB bluetooth adapter which worked
without any issue, and now I'm using my 2011 A1314 Apple keyboard instead of
one of those horrendous white USB keyboards that ALWAYS have something wrong
with them or fail pretty much immediately. (Seriously, I have had like five of
them, and the only one left functional enough to be fine has ONE issue and
that is Left Shift + O will not make a capital O. BUT RIGHT SHIFT AND O WILL.
LEFT SHIFT WORKS WITH EVERY OTHER KEY TOO. WHY?!) Sadly, it turns out my tilde
key failed on this one at some point (I tested with another device too to
verify), but y'know the keys feel good so I'll take it if I can't find another
one better (or preferably new old stock). It's a little inconvenient for using
the terminal and navigating Mac OS X (since Cmd+Backtick is what lets you swap
between windows of the same running application), but oh well. I also was able
to get my Apple Magic Mouse paired and working with MagicDriver, but since the
application has a hard-coded dead date in it, I have to reset the date on
every boot and reopen the application in order to get it to work correctly
(and deal with the annoying "Trial period for this beta app that was never
actually fully released" popup). I tried reverse engineering it using X-Code
with GDB, and I found the line where it makes a call to get the system time,
but changing the value in the registers doesn't seem to make a difference, so
I'm not sure exactly what's going on, and PowerPC assembler beyond that is a
little bit out of my depth. I might try something like Ghidra to disassemble
it and crack it to remove the message, but I may also just give up and use my
Mighty Mouse instead lol. The scrolling is nicer on the Magic Mouse, plus it's
wireless, but yeah. Either way lol. Small things!
Also I tried for two full days to get nxengine-evo to compile against its best
wishes, and I finally did but it gets a Bus error on launch, so I'm certain
there's an incompatibility. I also couldn't manage to build Rust to try and
use doukutsu-rs. Oh well lol. It's an experience!!!
That's all for now! If you made it this far I'm impressed!
~jebug29 (I had to use the on-screen keyboard for that tilde!)
