Chris Miller » 2008 » May

R.I.P. PB

Chris — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:46:23 +0000

As per my previous post, I’m getting a new machine. This is due however, to some unfortunate news: my PowerBook is dead!

The first Mac I ever owned, a PowerBook G4 which has served me very well over the past 5 or 6 years, is pretty much blitzed. My PowerBook and I visited Matt in Edinburgh on Saturday to see if we could revive it to it’s previous glory. We managed to pull all the stuff I needed from the hard disk, but that was all the good fortune we had.

It turns out the hard disk was suffering from a S.M.A.R.T. failure and locked up Matt’s computer when mounted as a target drive. We eventually managed to format the drive via Matt’s old PowerBook and everything looked good, but alas it was not to be – we received kernel panics when trying to install Mac OS X on the drive.

So it looks as if I’ll have to fork out for a replacement hard disk, which isn’t too big a deal at about Â£50 for 100Gb which would suit me. Until I manage to get one and install it my PowerBook is out of service.

/me salutes PowerBook, when my copy of the Necronomicon arrives I will bring you back!
- Chris

Good Sauce

Chris — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:22:51 +0000

I’ve not much food in the house today and since it’s not long until payday I’m rather poor, so I decided to make whatever I could based on what I had lying around. It turned out to be a masterpiece if I do say so myself.

Try it out:

Chicken breast
Pasta
Tin of chopped tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic
1 onion
½ punnet of mushrooms
½ courgette
Olive oil
Oregano
Basil

I started by slicing the courgette and onion and crushing the garlic. Then mixed half the garlic and some oil together, put the chicken breast, mushrooms, courgette and onion into an oven dish and poured the oil and garlic over, added a bit of dried oregano and basil and put in the oven for about half an hour.

Then put the tin of tomatoes into a pot, added the rest of the garlic, a bit more olive oil and a load of dried oregano and basil. When simmering I added the contents of the oven dish and simmered for 20 more minutes. I hope you’ll figure out what I did with the pasta on your own!

It was damn fine (see picture) and I’d highly recommend it.
- Chris

Mac Pro

Chris — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:30:37 +0000

I’ve recently ordered a new Mac, a Mac Pro to be precise. It is currently en route to my gleeful embrace from Apple.

The specs are as follows:

Processors: Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
RAM: 2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3
HDD: 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
Optical: Two 16x SuperDrives
Connectivity: AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi) & Bluetooth
Peripherals: Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse & Apple Wireless Keyboard

It should arrive later in the week, I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
- Chris