=== 29 December 2014 === I really am not very good at keeping this up to date, am I? Well, regardless, I finally got a desk an now my G4 is set up. Welcome to Telnet luxury -- OS X 10.4.11's Terminal. Really, the best part of using this setup is having a 17" CRT, rather than my old iMac's tiny 12" one. And once I get around to properly cleaning this CRT, it'll be absolutely beautiful! The only issue I'm having are some screen stability issues. In particular, at rates below 100hz, the whole damn mess seems to flicker an awful lot. I really hope this isn't a power/wiring issue, because I can't really do anything about that. Well, setting that aside, I'm real pleased to have gotten my Cube out of storage. I've rather missed using it. And look, I've gotten it out just in time for 2014 to end! Soon, it'll be /fifteen goddamn years old!/ That's surely good enough for me to call using it "retro computing." Doubly so since I tend to prefer using OS 9. The only reason I'm typing this in OS X is actually because it froze up when I was downloading a telnet program for OS 9, really. Well, that and I wanted to listen to some audio files, and OS 9 and FLAC don't really mix well. It's easier to just reboot and use VLC. Another nice feature is how much quicker Photoshop (and ImageReady) are on this G4 than on my iBook. Admittedly, part of that difference is because this has Photoshop 7 on it, versus the iBook's CS2. But I'm pretty sure the killer feature here is the 1.5GB of RAM in my Cube, versus the iBook's paltry 512MB. In a shocking twist, the computer using PC100 RAM has more, because you can find spare sticks literally everywhere. PC2100? Not so much. === 8 December 2014 === Well, now it's December. It's cold and thanks to the wind, generall unpleasant. But that's fine, I guess. I would be happier if it would at least be consistently cold, rather than wavering like it has been. I meant to gin up a website last month, to make use of the webspace SDF so generously provides. Naturally, I've done nothing on that front, except have a fun conversation on twitter about iframes. I don't even need iframes, since everything in html is already in a box. Hell, I could just do like SDF does and have the menu at the top of the page. That's even simpler! But really, my lack of progress is entirely due to laziness. Winter really does bring out the worst in me --- all I want to do is watch videos and drink coffee. Of course, that isn't terribly different from what I do during the majority of the year anyway. If I were being sensible, I'd go for a walk and try to find something interesting to photograph. But again, the weather makes the idea of doing so less appealing. Apart from the cold and the wind (and occasional rain/snow/&c.), everything tends to be grey and uninteresting. At least in the evenings you can enjoy peoples' Christmas displays --- but I suspect most people would be somewhat put-off by a man photographing their homes during the night (or at any time, really). At least part of the problem is that everything is so terribly familiar that I simply cannot generate the interest to even take a picture of it. Who really wants or needs tens of pictures of the same suburban streets and the same uninteresting businesses? Well, if slumps were easy to get out of, they wouldn't be slumps, right? Eventually I'll find something interesting, I'm sure. Until then, I guess my camera'll just sit around gathering dust. Hah, and to think, I occasionally think I want a medium format camera -- that'd end up getting used even less than my trusty Minolta!