Back in 2015, I created a BBS for Lobsters that worked in a web browser via WebSockets. After getting an old Mac earlier this year, I wanted a way to access the BBS from the Mac as natively as I could. Adding telnet and SSH frontends to the BBS was not too difficult, but being able to login from my Mac took a bit of work.

In January I got a Macintosh 512Ke on eBay and spent some time fixing it up. The screen would occasionally flicker and shut off, but banging on the side of the case would sometimes bring it back. Some research pointed me to the analog board needing some capacitors replaced, which has completely solved the problem.

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I've been using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary computer for six years. It's a great computer that satisfied a lot of requirements I had for a laptop: thin, lightweight, small form factor, excellent keyboard and touchpad, mostly silent, but not an Atom or Core M processor.

I've done a lot on this little computer, like compiling and maintaining an Android ROM, writing the Rails, iOS, and Android apps for Pushover, creating Lobsters, recording and editing 40 episodes of Garbage, and lots of OpenBSD development.

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Back when I used OpenBSD on my laptop and Pidgin for instant messaging, I wrote a D-Bus script to watch incoming messages and forward any to my cell phone that were received while my screen was locked. The script forwarded messages to Prowl's web API, which would forward them to my iPhone using push notifications.

The last time I switched back to a Mac desktop, I had to switch back to Adium and lost the ability to selectively forward messages. While Adium does have an event action to run an AppleScript, there's no way of passing the actual event text to the script, so it has to talk back to Adium and try to find the newest message. The only option was to generate Growl notifications for all messages and then configure Growl to forward them to Prowl. I got fed up with that pretty quickly, so I modified Adium to create a new event type for "messages received while away". That way I could have the Growl notification only on that event, so I would only get messages forwarded while away. That worked better, but it prevented me from being able to go away while still at my computer without getting a bunch of messages queued up on my phone.

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I've always formatted my Mac OS partitions with case sensitivity enabled, which usually means formatting a new system and re-installing Mac OS X as soon as I get it. After installing the 10.6.2 update, I lost my system menu bar icons and was forced to restore from a 10.6.1 backup made the day before.

Following Apple's instructions, I booted to the Snow Leopard installation DVD, chose the "Restore System from Backup" option and thought I was on my way. About 50% into the recovery, the recovery application crashed:

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My new 12" PowerBook arrived yesterday. I've been wanting to switch (back) to a PowerBook for a while to have working niceities such as Bluetooth, Firewire, iMovie, Automator, etc. The 15" PowerBook i had before was too big for me to carry around everywhere, so I figured a 12" would be somewhat comparable to my X40.

The first thing I did when it arrived was re-partition it to make a 6GB partition for OpenBSD and reinstall Mac OS on the large partition. I played around in Mac OS and got everything setup, but when I tried to install OpenBSD in its partition, the disklabel was occupying the entire drive space (even though the OpenBSD partition was only 6GB in fdisk) and it decided to format the entire drive. By the time I realized what it was doing it had already screwed everything up.

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I gave up on making the kernel emulate right-clicking from the keyboard since X11 already has all of this built in. Someone on the ppc@ list hinted at binding PointerButton2 and Pointer_Button3 with xmodmap.

This is basically what I'm using now, to have middle and right mouse buttons through the Apple/flower key and the square 'Enter' key, respectively:

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Someone on the ppc@ list posted about a CVS tree containing drivers for a lot of macppc hardware that hasn't been committed to NetBSD yet. I took his snapper and i2s drivers and whacked them into shape to link into OpenBSD. The snapper0 and audio0 drivers attach, but the kernel panics in the DMA code when trying to play audio.

My iMic finally arrived, so I kind of stopped working on making the internal snapper work. With functioning sound, I've been able to boot into OpenBSD at work. konq-e sucks, though, but Mozilla doesn't work so I'm stuck with it for now.

I finally got X working on my PowerBook!

After reviewing Linux kernel and XFree86 code for weeks, hacking the hell out of radeon_base.c adding random debugging everywhere, searching mailing lists for clues, and lots of guessing, I finally did the make && startx that resulted in a clean display coming up.

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Someone e-mailed me asking for a review of my 15" PowerBook, so here she be. I tried to write it like a magazine columnist, using many "colorful words" and over-analyzing everything.

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