admin | 
10 14th, 2008| 
Make Magazine’s blog had a link to another site, SpikenzieLabs, which profiles great uses or reuses for common items to make working on electrical projects easier. Check it out here!
Oct
6
Well, I installed the shim and put it all back together again, and the iBook is humming along alright. A few lock ups that are indicative of the logic board problem, but on the whole, it runs mostly stable. I reloaded OS X 10.5 and iLife and it was stable enough to do that plus update. It was a much easier job given that (a) I’d done it before with my 800 Mhz iBook G4 and (2) I wasn’t too vested in completing the job; if it crashed and burned never to work again, well, I wasn’t really out anything. Much less stressful…
So, we’ll see how it runs long term. Christmas came early for a fried of ours; I’ll be bartering the lappy for some baby-sitting time. w00t!
Oct
2
The iBook has been disassembled in my workshop. Googling brought up this ‘fix’, and much to my suprised, I coaxed a startup chime out of it. There is a stuck CD in the drive preventing the computer from booting, but after disconnecting the CD drive, I got a missing drive folder icon (yay!). I’ll dig up an old HD to see if I can install OS X on it via a firewire CD drive and see how stable it is with a shim installed between the logic board and the bottom of the case.
Now, the only challenge will be putting all these screws back in the right place…
Oct
1
I traded for a busted iBook 14″ 1.25 Ghz G4. My first apple PC was an 800 Mhz 12″ iBook G4, so it’s fun to come nearly full circle back to the iBook G4 family. This iBook suffers from the infamous logic board problem whereby putting pressure on the case allows the computer to work.
My plans for it involve replacing the HD with a solid state disk based on the CF to IDE adapters out there. Then, cobbling some parts off of eBay, replacing the logic board and CD drive with a super drive (that is, if my auction completes).
After that, who knows. The solid state disk limits the iBook to being more of a net book than a serious computer. Then again, so does the 1.25Ghz G4. I’ve wanted to build a solid state pc for a while too so it might as well be this project. If I can’t find a good use for it, most likely it’ll end up someone’s christmas present this year.