February 17th, 2005

The scuffed top of my Trombone case. Black leatherish covering with silver bits holding it all together.

Alright, that's enough toilet exposure. I didn't say anything during the Fall, so it's time for a recap.

I got lots of things! Let's make a list:

  1. 25-key Midi Keyboard (Thanks Parents)
  2. Weller Soldering Iron (Thanks Parents, again)
  3. New significantly longer-lasting iPod battery (Thanks Mason)
  4. Fluke Multimeter (Thanks Chris)
  5. Smallest 256MB flash drive EVAR!!11! (Thanks Vlad)
  6. USB 2.0 upgrade card with super-badass front-mounted firewire and USB ports mod involving Mindy's spintastic Dremel and lots of sparks (Thanks Mindy)
  7. Shiny, happy USB hub with blue LEDs and intelligently arranged ports, which is enroute (Thanks Dieter)

Jumping back to item six there for a moment, that was some krazy koolness. You see, my G4 came with an inexplicable internal firewire port. I always boasted about it as if it wasn't completely useless (which, until now, it was), because, dammit, I loved that port. I felt it was the best port I ever had. And now, it's no longer alone in the tower. It's plugged in.

Brings a tear to my eye. *sniff*

So yeah, I got the USB 2.0 card (used to be stuck with 1.1) with an internal port, then I dremeled some damn fine holes out of the face of my G4, and plugged some handy extender cables from FrontX and screwed 'em into the front. Now I've got sturdy, convenient, high-speed, power-supplying ports for all of my sensitive dongles.

Another big, kool thing that happened was Mindy's iBook overclocking. It has been known in the more experimental corners of the internet that Mindy's 500 Mhz iBook was capable of much more. You could, with a high probability *fidget*, add 100 Mhz to the clockspeed and bring the busspeed up from 66 Mhz to 100 Mhz. Not too shabby, and it worked! It makes for a noticable, risky, free upgrade. Though Mindy made me promise that if I broke it, I would by her a new, current model iBook *fidget* *fidget*.

Thankfully, it didn't come to that. Plus, the freeipods.com thing didn't turn out to be a scam, so she got a freeish 20 GB iPod too.

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