… must be flooding through my house. I have so many dead Amigas with broken diskdrives, it’s untrue. Every single Amiga I own (all four of them) has a dodgy diskdrive. And I’ve just been given another one to repair, and I’m failing!

Had to resort to buying an entire new A600 off a local friend in exchange for an XBox 360 game.

Bloody retro tech, it sucks sometimes. I’m going to buy a floppy disk cleaner out of desparation.

I decided it might be nice to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Not wanting to totally destroy my website in the process I set up a test site at home. Into the test site I copied my live website and its database, with the idea of making that work and then upgrading it and after some testing, put it on here.

Well I managed to copy my live website onto my test server and it mostly worked. For some reason the CSS was broken along with the theme. Then I tried to “upgrade” Drupal (read that as “delete the old code, replace with new code”) and was met with a white screen of nothing… or the Drupal installer which wouldn’t go past the database config screen.

I can’t be arsed now, I’m done with spending hours fucking around with this stuff it should just work with minimal faff. If I can be bothered, I’ll try again at some point, the current Drupal installation has loads of modules installed that I don’t use so they’re probably buggering it up.

Firstly, before I get onto the good stuff I’ve just received an email from a website containing a login password. Here’s the email:

Your username is: XXXXXX
Your password is: YGb(vIa^)OEK

Now I’m all for unguessable passwords, but adding punctuation into the mix is going a bit too far! And before you wonder, no I don’t really care that I’m plastering a password across the Internet because it doesn’t work any more.

So, today I have just got around to writing up how I have connected my Nokia N810 to my Garmin eTrex GPS so that I can download data from the GPS using GPSBabel (which I had to recompile). You can find the writeup on my main website at this address.

I have also written about how I found an actual use for Twitter!

And finally I’ve finished installing things into the Compaq Presario 486 I was given. It now has the ability to go online and the hackjob 486 DX2/66 upgrade with heatsink and fan seems to be holding too. I will now install Doom on it just as a test. It can then go and sit somewhere with DOS games on. I need to write this up later.

I’ve not done this in ages Sat, in pieces, in my office is a Compaq 486 all-in-one PC that Amy has given to me. It came preloaded with Windows 3.11 and contains a network card. My aim was simple - get it on the network, then see if it would go on the Internet.

Getting it on the network was easy, all I had to do was install the Windows 3.11 TCP/IP update and configure it. The machine popped up on my network and managed to install Netscape 4.0 off my Linux server. It had no idea what to make of the long filenames, but coped very well.

I ran out of disk space, the tiny 100meg HDD only having 7 meg free. So out it went and in its place went a 256MB CF card in a CF-to-IDE converter. Some farting around with fdisk and xcopy gave me a neat clone of the original HDD that booted.

Netscape didn’t run too well on the weedy 486SX/25 CPU and with only 4 meg of ram it was constantly swapping to the disk. Fortunately I had 8 meg of ram in another old PC so in that went, bringing the machine up to 20 meg of ram and instantly the disk swapping stopped. But it was still quite slow overall, so out of the old 486 came its DX2/66 CPU.

And here’s the current state of things. The CPU is designed for a ZIF socket because DX2/66s need heatsinks and fans to keep them cool. Originally I got around this issue by supergluing the heatsink and fan to the top of the CPU. This worked, but the superglue has gone brittle and the heatsink fell off. My next plan is to somehow attach a Pentium MMX class CPU cooler and heatsink to the processor, probably using cable ties and luck.

It’s fun though, and it’s been ages since I sat up for half the night fiddling with a PC.

The GEM Desktop, on a Nokia N810

A while ago someone on the Internet Tablet Talk forum posted an image of his N810 running Windows 3.11 in DOSBOX. Since then I’ve thought it’d be fun (if totally useless and impractical) to do something similar.

Being quite a fan of the Atari ST and its radioactive green GEM Desktop, I remember there was the GEM Desktop for DOS too. After a small amount of Googling I found a copy of DOSBOX for the Mac which was all set up to start GEM. It didn’t take me long to strip out the GEM folder and put all the bits together. Follow the link below to see what I did.

Unleash the greeny desktop on your N810

http://www.piku.org.uk/drupal/content/gem-desktop-nokia-internet-tablet-using-dosbox

Steve came over today and we spent a pretty productive day churning out code. We did it tag-team style with one of us writing and debugging while the other fiddled with the database, then when one of us came across code witten by the other, we’d switch jobs and continue.

Mobile’s still not working though.

Well they’ve made this a bit easy! I’ve spent the day following the beginner’s tutorial and have a rudimentary spaceship shooting game working. It shouldn’t have taken all day, but the tutorial videos are aimed at someone who’s never used Visual Studio or C# before. I know what an “if” loop is now, at least

MS appear to have made it quite straight forward to get things moving around the screen, which is good.

In other news, my Internet connection is having problems and is currently grinding along at 3MBits after spending the past half-hour having a fit and disconnecting every two minutes.

Apple Macintosh Classic running System 7.5.3

You know, to the uninitiated, installing an operating system in your computer is a daunting and complex task, full of the great unknown and the fear you may cause permanent damage to your beloved and expensive computer. To those of us who remember two floppy Linux installs and alpha-quality partitioning tools, installing an OS is easy; bung in the CD, press ‘Agree’ then ‘Next’ until it starts installing.

Are you feeling bored? Is the challenge of reinstalling Ubuntu or XP not hitting your tech g-spot any more? Then try a new one - get a Mac Classic running System 7.0.0 and attempt to install System 7.5.3 on it using nothing more than two floppy disks and another computer with a USB floppy drive and the Internet.

Those of you who owned a Mac back in the 90s will probably look at Apple’s site and go “ahh sea.bin files, righto I’ll just put Stuffit Expander on my Mac and away we go”. Then you’ll realise you need a system 7.0.1 or higher boot disk in order to mount the install image. Those of us who were messing around with Atari STs and low spec PCs at the time (being fascinated by Windows 3.0 on our 286s, even though all it did was play Solitaire) will take several hours to even work out what a sea.bin file is, and even longer to work out how to get the sodding thing into our old Mac. Thank you Google, you made the job only take a day.

I’ll write up the process later, along with a separate doc explaining how to diagnose and fix RAM faults since one of those cropped up too. Old hardware is ace stuff, it’s so knackered and liable to stop working at any moment. You want to see the corrosion on my Mac’s motherboard. In fact the whole inside of a Mac Classic is verging on a work of art.

I am attempting to upgrade the system software on my Macintosh Classic. Currently it runs System 7.0 and I want it to run System 7.5. I have the System 7.5 images from Apple, and a Macbook with an external USB floppy drive. I also have a set of high density floppy disks.

Not that getting data from one to the other is easy. I’m lost in a world of sea.bin files and not a lot of idea what to do with them. I didn’t own a Mac when this stuff was current, and it appears nobody ever thought “aha in 18 years time people will be downloading System 7 images from the Internet onto their new Macs and then want to install them on their old Macs”

I’ve been at this too long, I’m giving up for the night.

A Modchip installed inside an XBox

I’ve finally got around to writing up my experience chipping my XBox. Despite my troubles, chipping an XBox is an easy task that shouldn’t take more than half an hour. I was hampered by a damaged modchip and all the associated testing and trouble-shooting it took to diagnose this - although having to flex the chip to make it power up was a major hint something was not right.

Follow the story on my main website by visting my main website, or by clicking on the image. I’ve not written yet another “How to install an XBox modchip” document since what’s the point? The XBox is dead, chipping them isn’t the big novelty it used to be. Instead this is my experience chipping my XBox and how I trouble-shooted it. I learnt quite a bit and it was fun