Mac Obsession X Project

By now it's no secret that I love Mac OS X. It's not perfect, as nothing ever is, but it's the best so far for me. I can't help it; I like eye candy, and Apple even found a way to make some of the eye candy useful and some of the useful stuff eye candy...ful.

I own a Macbook, which I purchased for several reason. First off, the weight of my previous Dell laptop was enough to sink a medium-sized ship. Second, I realized that a laptop should just be a laptop, and a desktop should just be a desktop, and never the twain shall meet, really. Granted, my laptop is sitting on my desk right now, but that's beside the point... Anyway, I don't want to buy Apple hardware, really, because I have specific requirements. I don't want to lose half of my life savings on a computer, and I also don't need a computer that could, if it were a car, set a land speed record. But I also don't want a single-component box like the iMac or Mac Mini, because that defeats part of the purpose, which is to teach my brain about the current state of computing so that I don't become old and technically (if not actually) stupid. So, the Mac Pro is the only Apple machine I could buy, and it doesn't meet my lack-of-debt requirement. Third, a project, which should explain why I'm thinking Apple hardware. I am going to dual boot Linux and Mac OS X on this particular machine. With that in mind... the hardware list!

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L
CPU: Intel Wolfdale E8400 LGA 775
Video Card: MSI GeForce 9600GT 512MB PCI-E
Power Supply: Corsair 450W
Ram: 4 GB (2x2 GB) pqi
HDD: 500 GB (2x256 GB) Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA
Optical Drive: Samsung 20x DVD+/-R (though I may change this due to it being Samsung)

This is the plan. These are the results so far of just how painful this will be according to compatibility lists.

Gigabyte Board: Looks like it should mostly work without a problem, except Apple SMBIOS.kext, IONetworkingFamily
CPU: Intel E8400 Wolfdale (LGA 775) - Should be no problem
Video Card: GeForce 9600GT (Not listed) - The GeForce 8800GT should work, so I might go with that instead. TBD

More to come as this project continues... I'd love to have a really fast Mac OS box, and this would also prompt me to purchase Leopard (OS X 10.5) if I can get Tiger (OS X 10.4) working.

Death by iPod

The girl would probably like to kill me. I have, as of late, taken on a metric @55load of projects. My latest... Frankenpod. A simple concept; to take multiple broken iPods and create some smaller number of working ones. However, when multiple is 2 and broken means neither one has a fully working harddrive, it makes life hard. It's taken me nearly 3 days of tinkering to determine which components are bad.

One of these days I'll put it down. I still hold out hope that the parts aren't really bad, though...